Hey everyone,
On November 2, 2026, FRAGLINE: Esports Manager leaves Early Access and becomes version 1.0.

This is a long post. It has to be. Since the last update on September 30, the game changed more than in any month before it. There is a new game mode. You can design your own manager, start a career without a club, change clubs, resign or get sacked. The world keeps moving when you are not looking at it. Mods and the Steam Workshop are in. The whole interface was redesigned, and a match finally looks and sounds like a match.

If you only have a minute, read the short version. If you have a coffee, keep scrolling. Every section has screenshots or clips, so you can see it for yourself instead of taking my word for it.

• 1.0 launches on November 2, 2026 and the game leaves Early Access.

• The price changes with 1.0: from $11.99 to $19.99 (USD). Regional prices are set for every region. Until launch day, the Early Access price stays.

• New game mode, Draft Run: a roguelike built on the draft. Pick five players, play short matches with a deck of cards, beat the bosses and lift the trophy.

• Create your own manager with a background, attributes and languages that change how the game treats you.

• Start unemployed: no club, no squad. Build a reputation and wait for the phone to ring.

• Change clubs, resign, get sacked: bigger clubs come for you when you earn it, and the board loses patience when you don't.

• Timeouts and in-match morale: stop the match, talk to the team or to one player, and watch their faces change.

• A living world: tournaments, transfers, retirements and news go on whether you run a club or not.

• Mod support and Steam Workshop: logos, faces, names, full databases and tournament history, plus a free Mod Kit to make them.

• Smarter players: they spray through smokes, back off when flashed, hold their site, run to stop the defuse and stop staring at walls.

• Rebuilt map navigation on seven maps, and smokes and molotovs that finally have the right size.

• The 2D match, rebuilt to watch: shots, kills, the bomb, the defuse, smoke and fire, now with sound.

• A new interface, from the Home screen to the inbox, the squad, the match result and every Compete page.

• Room for casual players: give your staff the jobs you don't enjoy, then just build the team and play.

• 20 Steam achievements, 13 languages and much smaller patches.

Early Access started with a promise: a real esports manager with a real match engine behind it. 1.0 is the point where I believe the promise is kept, so the price moves with it.

• Until November 2: $11.99 (USD), the Early Access price.

• From November 2: $19.99 (USD).

• Regional pricing: every region gets its own local price, set for that region rather than a plain conversion from dollars.

If you already own the game, nothing changes for you. 1.0 is a free update, like every update before it, and everything in this post is part of it.
If you have been waiting for 1.0 before buying, the cheapest moment to get the game is before November 2. I would rather say that plainly than have anyone feel caught out by the change.

About your saves: saves from Early Access will still open in 1.0, but a lot has changed under the hood, and an older career may run into stability or compatibility problems further down the road. You can keep playing one, at your own risk. For the best experience, and to see everything new (the manager profile, the unemployed start and database mods all begin with a new career), I strongly recommend starting fresh on launch day.

FRAGLINE is a deep game. Training plans, sets, scouting, contracts, sponsors, press. Some of you love every bit of that. Some of you told me you just want to build a team and watch it win. Both are fine now.

A new page under Squad lists the jobs you can hand over, and who on your staff would take each one:

• Team training. Your coach writes the week every Monday and sends you the plan with a small chart: what the week trains, which players grow and which maps get sharper. Keep it or change it.

• Individual training and skill points. Your coaches pick focuses and spend skill points where each player's role needs them.

• Match plan. Your staff sets up the tactics for each map.

• Tournament invitations. Choose Busy, Balanced or Selective and your staff accepts or declines invitations for you, and tells you why.

• Set planner. Your analysts draw plays for every map and pick the best ones each week based on results. The weekly mail shows each set on a small map.

Better staff do these jobs better, and the page tells you who is doing what. If a chair is empty, your assistant covers the basics so nothing stops.

• A weekly checklist arrives in your inbox with the things you may have missed: no head coach, a missing starter, unanswered invitations, an empty sponsor slot, unspent skill points. Every line is a shortcut to the right page.

• A last call reaches you before a tournament's registration closes, if your calendar is still empty.

• Accept or decline invitations right from the mail. When you accept, a fixture summary lands in your inbox with dates, the draw and what else is on your schedule.

• Calendar clash? If one tournament blocks another, the invitation offers to take this one and drop the other, in one click.

The new Home screen has one card that lists what needs you right now. Click a line and you are there. When the card is empty, you are free to press Continue.
And if you only have an evening, there is now a whole mode built for exactly that.

Draft Run is a roguelike built on top of the draft. It has its own menu entry, its own progress, and it never touches your career saves. One run takes about 40 minutes at 4x speed.

You open packs and pick five players. Cards come in five tiers (Standard, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Elite), and the better ones shine. Every pick costs from a shared purse, and whatever you don't spend becomes money for the shop later. A star playing out of his role is cheaper in the AWP and IGL seats. Is that a bargain or a trap? Your call. At the end you name your team and pick its tag.

Five wins make you champion. Two losses end the run.

• Crossroads: twice on the road you choose your next opponent. Standard is the safe path. Elite is harder, plays with an extra rule, and pays out with a sponsor.

• The boss: you see the boss and its rules from the start of the run, so you can build for it. Armored Wall, Rush Squad, Broke Bank, Star Player, Eco King, Bounty Hunter, Fixed Defense and more.

• The final: two rules, one trophy.

Matches are short: first to nine rounds, no overtime. At 8-8, a single decider round settles it.

This is where Draft Run becomes its own game. In every freeze time the match stops, you get 2 energy and a hand of 3 cards, and you decide what this round needs.

• Armory Drop: SMGs for the players who have no rifle this round.

• Body Armor: armor and helmet for one player.

• Juggernaut: one player starts the round with 70 extra health.

• Wallhack: every opponent shows on the radar for a few seconds, at the moment you choose.

• Revenge: whoever kills your player is revealed.

• Last Stand: your last player alive gets a second wind.

• Flick Round: sharper first shots for one round.

• Force Loan: borrow energy now, pay it back only if you lose the round.

• Timeout: throw your hand away and draw a new one.

• Retake Protocol: a defensive card you unlock by beating your first boss.

• Chicken Round: the legendary one. The two nearest opponents spend the round as chickens. They can't shoot.

Cards are not hidden numbers. After every round, a card ledger shows what each card actually did: the damage your armor absorbed, the kills made with the rifle you handed out, the opponents who died while revealed. During the round, small labels float over your players on the radar the moment a card kicks in.

Two more decisions every freeze time:

• The call: tell your IGL to hit A or B on T side, or to stack a site on CT. They follow it most rounds.

• A round mission: win the pistol, win an eco, take the first kill, plant and win, defuse, or get a four-kill round. Complete it and your next hand gets an extra card.

• The shop: four slots with match cards, equipment and a bootcamp. Reroll the shelf, lock the slot you want for later.

• Equipment stays for the whole run: Aim Camp, Spray Drill, AWP Coach, Clutch Coach, Playbook.

• Bootcamp: remove a card from your deck or train a player for good.

• Sponsors fill a rack of four and trigger during matches: Warmup Camp, Composure Coach, Analyst Tablet, Momentum, Kill Bonus, Eco Hero, Interest Master, Captain's Armband.

• Interest: money you save earns more money. Losing a match opens a smaller consolation shop, so a loss is never the end of your options.

Choose a philosophy before the run: Classic, Aim Factory, Info War or Economy Master. Each changes your starting deck, sponsor and purse. Win clean runs to unlock more, then raise the Pressure level for harder runs with tougher bosses and tighter money. At the end of each run you get the full story: the road, your record, every card's contribution and what you discovered along the way.

Draft Run is in the full game only.

Before, you were a name on a contract. Now you are a person.

• Name, age and nationality.

• A former career: Ex-Pro, Caster, Journalist, Analyst, Player Agent or Academy Coach. Each one gives you a strength, a weakness and a small perk. An Ex-Pro gets more respect in hard conversations. A Caster sells more merch. A Player Agent gets better offers for players. An Academy Coach gets a better youth intake.

• Six attributes: Tactical, Man Management, Negotiation, Youth Work, Media Handling and Discipline. You spend a points budget, and the top of each scale costs more, so nobody is great at everything.

• Languages: your native language, scene English, and extra languages from your background. Talk to your players in a language they understand and your words land better.

Your attributes do real work. Tactical helps the team learn your plans faster. Man Management makes your talks hit harder. Negotiation saves you money at the table. Youth Work speeds up your youngsters. Media Handling helps with sponsors and the press. Discipline keeps a restless dressing room calm. Your profile is saved, so you can carry the same manager into every new career.

There is now a third way to start a career: Journeyman. No club, no squad, no budget. The calendar runs, the scene plays its tournaments, and job offers start arriving in your inbox.
Who calls you depends on who you are. Your reputation decides how high you can aim. Your languages, your region and your profile decide which clubs think you fit. A club full of teenagers wants someone good with youth. A club with a messy dressing room wants discipline. Every offer tells you why they want you. You can also apply for open jobs yourself, up to three at a time. You won't sit by the phone forever: the first offer comes within your first two weeks.

When you take a job, you take the club as it is: its players, its academy, its staff, its money and the tournaments it already signed up for.

Your job is no longer for life.

• The board is watching. Their confidence rises and falls with your results against what the club expects. First a warning, then an ultimatum, then the sack.

• Bigger clubs come knocking once you have earned it with titles, a climbing world rank and years in the job. Say yes or say no. If you are in the middle of a tournament, the move waits until it ends.

• You can resign whenever you want, from Club > Manager.

• Leaving means something. You get a review of your spell (titles, best finish, how far the club climbed, your best signing and sale) and the press writes about it. The club goes back into the world with its players, and if you ever return, your trophies are still in the cabinet.

• The merry-go-round never stops. Other clubs fire and hire managers every week. A weekly mail and the news keep you up to date, and empty seats are job openings for you.

The world of FRAGLINE is about 1,200 clubs, and in 1.0 all of them live.

• Your club is the only permanent one. Every rival is part of the world scene: you meet them in tournaments, they buy your players, and rivalries form from the matches you actually play.

• Tournaments stay played. Results are saved now. Loading a save no longer re-decides past tournaments, so the champion you read about stays the champion.

• World clubs buy and sell players, about 40 transfers a year, busiest in the winter and summer breaks. A club that loses a starter replaces him from a weaker club. Free agents sign. All of it shows up in the news and in the Transfer page's Recent Moves.

• Players age, peak and retire, and new talent comes through every year. Potential no longer drops every January (an old bug, now fixed), and the pool of hidden gems your scouts can find refreshes every year.

• Big retirements are news. Some former pros join the staff market as coaches and analysts you can hire, and the greats enter the Hall of Fame.

• The news follows real results. Upsets and big finals come from the actual brackets the scene played.

It is the same world whether you run a club or you are between jobs.

You now have three tactical timeouts per match, plus one for each overtime. Call one during a round and it starts at the next freeze time. The match really stops.

• Talk to the whole team or take one player aside. Every option is a real line you say: stay calm, back them up, stick to the plan, demand more, fire them up, praise them, or tear into them.

• How they react depends on them: their personality, the scoreline, how they feel right now, and how many times you have already said the same thing. Criticism can wake up a hungry player, or break a fragile one.

• The opponent calls timeouts too when they lose three rounds in a row, and a timeout cools the other team's momentum.

Your players' cards now show a small face: green and smiling, yellow and flat, red and down. It moves with kills, deaths, round wins, streaks and clutches, and it affects how well they aim. It starts from your players' morale in the career, so the talk before the match finally matters on the server, and a little of how the match went stays with them afterwards.

• A new match prep screen: your game plan, your analyst's read of the opponent and your team talk, side by side.

• A new results screen: the score counts up, a strip shows every round, the MVP gets a card of their own, and in tournaments you see your path and the bracket. Quick-simulated matches get the same screen.

• The match no longer cuts away the moment the last player falls. The final round gets its moment.

A small cup and a Major are no longer the same headline. Win a Major and the scene writes about it for days: the final, the star, the history, the fans, the prize money. You get a press roundup, a note from the board, the commercial side of the win and interviews with your players, who answer in their own voice depending on their personality.

After big moments (a title, a final, an elimination, a signing, a new job), journalists send you questions. Answer boldly, calmly, or dodge the question. Your answers affect your players' mood and how they see you, and they become a news story with your quotes in it. Stay silent for three days and that becomes the story instead.

The radar view was the part of the game you stared at the most, and it looked the least alive. Not anymore.

• Shots have muzzle flashes, thin tracers and hit sparks.

• Kills flash in the team's color and leave a mark. Headshots get their own effect, and their own sound.

• The bomb: a timer plate hangs under the scoreboard once it is planted. The beeps speed up with the real timer. The explosion fills the radar with a shockwave, fire, debris and smoke.

• The defuse: a ring forms around the defuser with his countdown. If he won't make it in time, it turns red and says so.

• Smokes are thick clouds now, and molotovs burn with real flames.

• Grenades in flight show their icon, and the bomb carrier wears a small C4 badge so you always know who has it.

• A new round win card with the team's crest, the reason the round ended and the round's MVP.

• Callouts on the radar, so you can tell where the fight is at a glance.

And it has sound now. Gunshots near and far, headshots, footsteps that follow the fight, bomb beeps, the defuse and the explosion. Sounds sit left or right depending on where they happen.
Players stop staring at walls. A player holding a position now looks at an open angle, not at the brick in front of his nose.

The match engine got its biggest round of work so far. In plain words:

• Smoke spam: a player who hears an enemy behind a smoke sprays through it. Supports and entries do it most, AWPers don't, lurkers stay quiet so they don't give away their spot.

• No more walking blind into enemy smokes. Players wait at the edge, look for another way around, or crouch and watch where you will come out. They only push through when the clock forces them to, like a defuse or a late plant.

• A flashed player backs away from the threat and fires blind if the enemy is close. Entries hold their ground, AWPers step back.

• Panic means stepping behind a corner, not turning around in the open.

• Players turn toward whoever shot them, and switch targets to the enemy who is actually hurting them.

• Flashes respect walls, and blind far less when you are looking away. Players also flash before peeking an enemy they know is there.

• Terrorists run to stop the defuse instead of walking.

• After the plant, they pick spots where they can actually see the bomb, so free defuses behind a crate are mostly gone.

• The bomb is planted inside the site, the planter stays put until it is down, and nobody runs home with the bomb while teammates are still fighting.

• Defenders hold their site under pressure instead of wandering off before the plant.

• No more two smokes on the same spot. Teammates check what the others are throwing.

• The second grenade gets thrown. Players used to buy two and use one.

• Smokes get refreshed when the enemy is still waiting behind them, and defenders throw molotovs at a push in the middle of the round, not only at the start.

• Molotovs burn for 14 seconds, twice as long as before.

• Defenders who keep their rifle now buy armor, a kit and utility with the money they have.

An Entry, an AWPer, a Lurker and a Support now make these choices differently, and so do personalities. A cool-headed player keeps fighting through a flash. An ambitious one won't wait long at a smoke before looking for another way.

AI opponents now plan their maps from nearly 3,000 rounds of professional play: which site they like, how they set up, how they spend their money.

On seven maps, the ground players can walk on was rebuilt from scratch. In practice:

• Players reach spots they used to miss: box tops, catwalks, narrow walkways.

• They climb ladders and drop off ledges the way you would.

• No more long detours around a gap that a real player would just step over, and no more players stuck on a corner.

• Bomb site targets sit on walkable ground, so nobody tries to walk into a pool or onto a train car to reach "the middle of the site".

Smokes and molotovs now have the right size on every map. Each map is scaled differently in the game, and the old fixed size made smokes almost twice as wide as they should be on the largest maps. That is why some smokes landed in strange places. Teams also stopped smoking the same far-away spot at the start of every round.

The whole interface got a new look: dark glass panels, clear type, and the red of the logo used only where something needs your attention.

• Home: six big cards for the screens you use the most, your next match, and the Needs Attention list.

• Inbox: every mail now shows who sent it, with a portrait or crest, and a side panel about the person or club it is about. Match reports open with the score. Eight "tournament starts in N days" mails became one weekly circuit digest. Contract reminders come as one list instead of a mail per player. There is a filter bar, search, an archive, and every mail fits on the screen at any interface scale.

• Squad: player cards with portraits, ratings and contract warnings.

• Draft: collectible card tiers with foil.

• Club: eight tabs (General, Sponsors, Budget, Team, Manager, History, Goals and Hall of Fame).

• Compete: Ratings with your climb over time, Map Data and Player Data with charts, a match History, and Fixtures with your next match and invitations.

• Hall of Fame for your club and for the whole scene.

• The Esports Portal now lives inside the game under Media.

• A Back button everywhere, and Esc goes back.

• Calendar, settings, match prep, veto, loading and mods screens were all redesigned too.

FRAGLINE now supports mods, and the Steam Workshop is open.

• Club logos, by club or as a pool for generated clubs.

• Player and staff faces, by person or as pools by country and age.

• Icons for the menus, weapons and grenades.

• Names: rename clubs and tournament organizers, replace the name pools for any country.

• A full database: your own clubs with colors and founding year, players with roles, attributes, personality, wages, market value and career history, staff, free agents.

• Tournaments: series names and formats, and the scene's past champions.

• Match skins: colors, fonts and map backgrounds for the match screen. These are made by hand for now; the first release of the Mod Kit does not cover them.

Subscribe on the Workshop and the mod appears in the new Mods screen. Turn mods on or off and set their order. Visual mods change the game right away. Database mods go into a new career and stay with that save, so a mod update never breaks a career in progress. Achievements are turned off while a database mod is active.

A free tool to make mods, in your Steam Library under Tools. Edit the database in tables, add tournaments and past champions, match images to people and clubs, edit names, check your mod for problems before anyone else sees them, and publish to the Workshop from the same window. No coding needed.

• 20 Steam achievements, from your first title to a long and complicated career.

• Staff that fit together: an assistant coach adds the skills your head coach is missing, staff have traits with an upside and a cost, and the staff market shows what each hire would change before you sign.

• Chemistry before you sign: the transfer and scouting screens show how a new player would affect your team's chemistry. A player with no shared language can hurt more than you think.

• A chemistry panel in the squad draft, with ages, nations and the call language of the five you pick.

• Your academy grows with your club.

• 13 languages, with a full pass on the interviews, press questions, news and mails in every language so they read like people wrote them.

• Much smaller patches. The game's files are now split so an update only downloads what changed. A typical patch is a few dozen megabytes instead of the full 220 MB. The 1.0 download itself is a full one, because the files are laid out the new way. After that, patches stay small.

• Lots of fixes, faster screens, and text that no longer gets cut off at any interface scale.

1.0 is not the end. It is the point where the foundation is done and I can build on it with confidence.

• Draft Run gets a follow-up update with a daily challenge, higher Pressure levels and card synergies.

• Balance passes on everything that is new, based on what you tell me and what your saves show.

• The Workshop is yours. I can't wait to see what you build with it.

To everyone who bought the game in Early Access, left a review, posted a bug on Discord or sent me a screenshot of something that looked wrong: this version exists because of you. A lot of what is in this post started as one of your messages.
If you enjoy FRAGLINE, a Steam review helps more than anything else I can ask for. If something looks wrong in 1.0, tell me. That is still how this game gets better.

See you on November 2.

Discord: https://discord.gg/q7s5wdP9eG

FRAGLINE

• Charts on both pages (Compete > Map Data / Player Data). Map Data opens with four cards: your map pool by side (where you win on T, on CT, on both), the round form of the selected map, round wins by buy type (pistol, eco, force, full buy) and A/B site results. Player Data shows the squad's form lines, a profile radar against teammates, and each starter's opening kills, multi-kills and clutches.
  
• Live matches are recorded as played. The round log of a match you watch is now that match. Before, the ledger kept a resimulated match with the same winner, so side, pistol and opening numbers could describe a different game.
  
• Career means career. The Career scope keeps counting across seasons (it used to reset with the season and matched Season exactly). Older saves count from this update on.
  
• No fake zeros. Simulated results no longer write 0 for KAST, headshots and opening duels. Those show "—" until measured, so averages are not dragged down. T side, CT side and Top 5 scopes now apply to every column, not only the rating. Player Data opens about three times faster.

• A declined offer stays declined. A club you turn down waits 60 days before asking again for the same player.
  
• Offers come from clubs that need the player, not from whoever is first in the list.
  
• AI clubs pay real wages and a signing fee for free agents, so the richest club no longer wins every bidding war.

• More varied headlines. The same template no longer comes back to back. World teams now appear in the news and the region filter works. New stories: A-tier MVPs, your players' EVP awards, head coach hires, wonderkid promotions and star renewals across the scene. The match centre shows the tournament name instead of the old league label.

• Settings rebuilt as a full page: FPS cap, V-Sync, window resolution, mute in background and a tooltip switch. Gamepad input is now off by default (a connected pad could make the menus jump); turn it on under Interface.
  
• Training editors reworked. The session editor and the week planner match the rest of the training screen, dragging focus tiles into the planner works again, and dropping on a filled slot swaps the two.
  
• Grenades in the air show their icon on the radar and in the 3D view, and the 3D view has deeper colors.
  
• Staff candidates load in batches instead of freezing the screen, and the contract book's wage default follows the player's current demand.