The studio director of Football Manager maker Sports Interactive Miles Jacobson OBE has said that the franchise finally launching in Germany was one reason that the most recent entry in the long-running series has passed two million sales since its November release.

Speaking to PCGamesInsider.biz, the development vet said that launching in that country for the first time accelerated Football Manager 19 sales, but the game would have smashed two million copies eventually even without the German release. The title previously wasn't available, but Sports Interactive signed a deal with Germany's top league - the Bundesliga - granting it entry to the region.

Jacobson also said that Football Manager being given a fresh coat of paint helped sales, too.

"[Hitting 2m copies] this early has been down to releasing in Germany for the first time – but extrapolating the sales compared to other years excluding Germany, it still looks like we would have done it anyway," he said.

"Part of the reason was the new features and overarching quality, part was due to the re-brand, both for the game look and the marketing, and part was due to the increasing popularity of our games globally – our sales have been going up every year since we’ve been making Football Manager, apart from one upward glitch in a year where the game wasn’t cracked compared to the next title being cracked quickly."

Asked how big a portion PC was of the two million unit sales milestone, Jacobson said: "PC went over a million units a few weeks before we went to two million across all platforms, and a sale on Steam helped push us over the two million mark. So you can work out the maths from that…"

You can read our full interview with Jacobson later this week