Gerald Köhler returned to the soccer manager stage with We Are Football. However, a successor to Anstoss cannot be expected – for good reasons
Games developer Gerald Köhler is primarily associated with one series: Anstoss. He released further titles in 2021 and 2024 with We Are Football and We Are Football 2024. A new Anstoss 3? Not at all. For good reasons, as Köhler explains in an interview with eSport: “You can only lose if we had planned a Anstoss 3 successor. The game would be directly associated with many memories. Many things that weren’t good back then and would have had to be implemented or omitted would be even more noticeable today. Game design in general has evolved. And then the magic of the past would be gone. “
Serious, but not without humor
Even though We Are Football (WAF) is more serious and, above all, reminiscent of the days of the great manager machos, Köhler remains true to his line: “I want to put a smile on the players’ faces with jokes. That starts with events that occur during a match and continues with perimeter advertising.” One example: “At Wolfsburg, the club motto is ‘You can cry with us’.”
Köhler hasn’t changed a thing when it comes to working with the community either. Even back in the days of Anstoss, “we did things that nobody expected. For example, a questionnaire where we specifically asked the players what they wanted. Back then, we had thousands of these questionnaires and correspondingly broad feedback. “
Taking development “one step further “
At WAF, the development team has even “gone one step further. In the past few months, nine people from the community have joined our team. That was authentic and a discussion at eye level.” For Köhler, this was a considerable advantage compared to beta testers at the end of the project, because there it was “all about bug fixing. However, our starting point was to find things that were difficult to use or missing information. Of course, there was also time for one or two additional features.”
It is important to him to keep the target group in mind, but also to observe innovations: “Our player base consists mainly of male players between the ages of 30 and 50. We occasionally banter in the Discord about whether we need to increase the contrast or font size in-game, as we all can’t see as well as we used to.” Basically, the aim is to create a fast-paced game that can be played in a relaxed manner after work. No element “should be so big that it completely takes over and complicates WAF.”
In terms of innovation, Köhler has observed a trend: passive gaming. These are “gaming sessions in which people simply simulate. You only intervene if something goes wrong. Then transfers are made and things are changed until success is achieved again. Then we simulate far into the future again.” The fact that playing behavior is changing is therefore also a reason to break away from the past. But without leaving his identity behind
