The OSM Family

15 November 2019

One of the most important assets of being a good football manager is your staff. The staff has always played a prominent part in OSM. Because it stands for the social aspect of the game: you can’t manage a club on your own just like you can’t play OSM on your own.

The staff has its own iconic style, created way back when OSM first launched in 2004. Warm, accessible and social characters who reflect the principles of the game: positive, easy to play and best to play with friends.

We’ve always been curious, how do our players feel about the characters? Apart from the occasional post on our forum or comment under our social posts, it was hard for us to find an answer to this question. So we set up research to ask our players. We found out they sympathized with the characters and were also hoping the Doerak staff would mature.

The answer was obvious and also a reminder for us to keep asking questions to our players. Gamebasics, the game industry and football itself matured throughout the years. So it made perfect sense that our user base was maturing as well. And that they’d like to see characters that were more mature.

This became an exciting new project for us. Redesigning our characters and at the same time rethinking their background stories. During this process we also decided to look at some other aspects of the characters. We made them more diverse, less stereotypical and more expressive. And of course our designers outdid themselves with the visual work.

This led to a more mature, modern, divers, expressive and cool staff that should better fit the cultural diverse backgrounds of our user base. The first reactions were great. Players were excited. Since our players tend to play OSM for a long period of time, they were also nostalgic. A great outcome for us: satisfying our players with respect for our history.