Until today, Focus had never really confirmed the existence of the Tour de France game for XBOX360 and Playstation 3, but that has changed today with an official announcement that confirms that the two games will be released in Europe on the 1st of July.

As revealed by PCM.daily, the game focuses on the Tour de France where you control a single rider during the 21 stages of the Tour. Nothing else of interest is mentioned in the official announcement, though, but it does come with three new screenshots that you can see in our screenshot section.

As announced a couple of days ago, it's now possible to pre-order Pro Cycling Manager 2011.

The price has been set to 45 €, but based on experiences from previous years, it may differ from country to country - with the US region usually getting the lowest price. You won't be able to download and play the game until the 23rd of June.

As mentioned in the previous news article, we're working on a deal with Focus which is similar to last year's deal - meaning that if you wait a couple of days, you can pre-order the game through PCM.daily and support the site at the same time. We will get a few copies of PCM11 that we'll put on stake in a couple of competitions. Also, people who buy the game through PCM.daily will automatically participate in a lot arranged by Focus with some extra prizes later in the year. So, in short, we hope that you can wait a couple of days extra. You won't be able to play the game until the 23rd anyway ;)

Lastly, the pre-ordering site also reveals the system requirements:

OS: Windows XP SP2 / VISTA SP1 / 7
Processor: Pentium4 2,2GHz / AthlonXP 2800+ or higher
RAM Memory: 1024 Mo (XP) / 2048 Mo (Vista)
3D Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce 6600 / ATI Radeon X700 or higher, 128Mo, DirectX 9.0 and Shaders 2.0 compatible
DVD-ROM: 2X Drive
Hard disk space: 6Go
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 compatible

It took a while, but Focus has now decided to open up for the official website of PCM11. The link is as always cycling-manager.com.

The website doesn't bring much new, but it's mentioned that it will be possible to pre-order the download version of the game on the 15th of June - so mark you calenders, friends.

Speaking of the download version, PCM.daily is working on making a deal similar to last year where you can buy the game and support PCM.daily at the same time. Unfortunately, it's not possible to get a price reduction for the PCM.daily members (or anyone else, for that matter - the price is fixed, we've been told), but we may be able to come up with some other interesting initiatives.

More news on this soon :-)

Update: Just to be clear: You do not have to be German to do German riders. Anyone is capable of doing this, but it may be easier for Germans to do Germans. If you're interested in helping out with other countries than your own, please say so.

With every new edition of PCM, there's a few database changes that reflect the changes in the game. Last year, we saw the new prologue stat being added to the game, and this year, PCM11 comes with regions and rider popularity.

So -- knowing this, and knowing that there there are ~3.000 riders in the PCM.daily DB, it's easy to predict that we're going to need some help on this area, just like we did last year where the members helped out with doing the prologue stats for the riders.

Basically, we are looking for people who are interested in finding out where the riders come from. People from Spain will probably find it easier to identify Spanish riders' "regionality" than I do, just like the Germans know their riders better. So, it's quite simple, and no editing knowledge or anything similar is required. It should also be noted that more than 1.000 riders have already been done.

If you have the time to do e.g. the German riders, the Spanish riders etc. asap and know how to do some research, PM me with the country you're interested in doing, and I'll get back to you almost immediately.

With (probably...) less than one month to the release of PCM11 (for PC), Focus has released the first trailer of the game.

As always, the focus is on the racing part of the game, so the most surprising thing is actually the fact that they changed the music (which is still horrible, really). You also see a short clip of a rider covered in mud.

Other than that, no surprises - but the game does look quite amazing.

The trailer can be seen here.