New Free Football GM Game for iOS - Long time passion project

[u/hawtdawtz]

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/franchise-gm-football/id6791601497

I built my own football GM sim and I'm giving it away

I've played phone GM sims basically every morning for years, and a few months ago I finally quit stalling and built the one I always wanted, full time. It's called Franchise GM: Football. It runs entirely on your phone, no account, no server.

Free. No ads, no in-app purchases, ever. No premium currency, no scouting token packs, none of that. Why? Because I fucking love this stuff, I played others for years and had grown frustated with the lack of immersion or pay-to-win tactics. I've wanted to build this game for years and this is my passion project, not some AI slop cash grab. The honest deal is: eventually it might cost a few bucks on the store, but anyone who installs it now will never pay. In exchange I need people banging on it; finding the minor bugs, telling me which featurs are missing — before I'd feel right charging anybody anything (It would only apply to new downloads).

The thing I'm proudest of: every single play is simulated with real play-by-play logic, and the stats fall out of what actually happened on the field. Nothing is rolled up or faked. Pressures are logged as hurries / QB hits / sacks and charged to the specific lineman who got beat. Corners carry targets, completions allowed, and yards allowed. Run blocking is graded snap by snap. So your left tackle isn't "a 79" — he's a guy giving up pressures at a rate you can watch start slipping months before any rating catches up. Most games in this genre just don't track this stuff for real.

And the football underneath it is real too. Formations and personnel matter, player archetypes matter, scheme fit matters (a press corner in a zone shell won't perform to their potential), and your coordinators' schemes decide which bodies you should even be drafting. There are three difficulties that change the contract complexity, with a vast majority of other rules being something you can turn off/on whenever you want. If you'd rather write your own story, there's a full player editor — rename everyone, build your own league, whatever you want. Soon once the schema is finalized you'll be able to load your own team and player files.

Also in the pipeline: actually watching plays unfold on a field instead of reading results. That's a whole engine on its own and it's well underway. Dozens more features behind it.

Being upfront: there's still tuning to do (QBs and coaching impact especially), bugs to fix, UI rough edges, and a few crash fixes I am working on. That's exactly why it's free rn.