Why we deleted our battle pass

By the start of May 2026, ManageFC had grown the way many free games grow: one engagement feature at a time, each one reasonable on its own. There was a battle pass with a reward track. There was a social feed full of activity. There were daily nudges, crises that demanded attention, and currency top-ups one click away.

On 8 May we sat down and read the whole list in one go. It read like a catalogue of every technique that keeps people clicking, and almost none of it made the football better.

The audit

We asked the same three questions about every feature:

1. Would a player feel respected by this?
2. Does it still work for someone who plays twice a week?
3. Can a player stop for a month without being punished?

A battle pass fails the second and third questions by design: it is a clock that runs whether you play or not, and missing weeks means losing rewards you were "on track" for. A social feed padded with automated activity fails the first. Crises that appear every day whether anything happened or not fail all three.

What we removed that day

• The battle pass, completely — the reward tracks, the progress and every screen that pointed to them.
• The social feed. A feed that exists to make a world look busy is a kind of fake social proof, even when every item in it is technically true.
• Real-money payments for the open beta. The checkout was switched off entirely, and a notice explains why. Nothing can be bought until the game is stable enough to deserve it.
• A long onboarding was cut from six steps to three, so new managers reach the football faster.

What we added instead

Removing things was only half of it. The same day we added vacation mode: set a return date up to 90 days away and the game stops generating pressure aimed at you — no crisis events, no inbox noise waiting for you when you come back.

We also wrote down the sentence that has guided the project ever since:

We want a game people love, not one they can't put down.

What we did not get right yet

Honesty matters more than a tidy story, so here is what that day did not fix. A small daily login bonus stayed in the game, and missing a day resets it to one. We described that bonus as "soft decay" on the website for a while, which was not true — we found and corrected that in September, when we audited every claim on our own site. The bonus is small, only pays a little experience, and is the only streak left, but it is still a streak.

Update, October 2026: that last streak no longer pays anything, and missing a day now only lowers it a little — the details are in Designing against FOMO.

Why it mattered commercially, too

It is tempting to see this as a choice between ethics and money. It was not really. The engagement features were not making the game better, and a game that is not better does not keep players for long — however many reminders it sends. Cutting them made room for the change that came six days later: moving the whole game to a private world per save, where time only moves when you want it to.

Before that, though, another decision from the same day: why ManageFC is English-only for now.