Before the PR kicked me out of Miles' office for taking up too much of his time, there was one more topic I wanted to touch on; Google Stadia. The Internet giant's new console-hybrid platform has been confirmed to feature Football Manager 2020 as a launch title on November 19, and Sports Interactive hasn't been shy in suggesting that it will be the fastest way to play the game.
"We have some technology that's gone into it that was originally designed internally for use by our QA team to be able to play more matches," Miles explained to me without using too much jargon to keep it on a level that we can all understand and appreciate. "So our matches are one of the most intensive parts of the processing of the game, because every match – even the matches that you aren't playing – they still simulate the full match. There are eight-time splices per second. Multiply that up to 90 minutes. It's a lot of splices, a lot of maths, [and] a lot of decisions that get made."
"What the match accelerator software does, it works in a similar way to Bit Torrent. But rather than an internet connection, it uses computational power. So any spare computational power on any of the PCs on our network will start churning away, doing processes for matches, and running more matches. We're going to be doing that in Google's data centres. So the spare capacity in Google's data centres will mean that other machines in those data centres will be playing matches, and then streaming those to you quicker."