‘PES and FIFA war has transformed football genre’

The ongoing battle between PES and FIFA is having a revolutionary effect on the football genre, says Konami.

Pro Evo team leader Jon Murphy believes that before FIFA’s recent critical resurgence, football games had stagnated. Now, with Konami and EA going toe-to-toe on quality, the genre has improved drastically.

We keep an eye on them as they keep an eye on us,” Murphy told MCV.

If you look at what they announced recently in their videos you will see that a number of the things they are doing this year we were doing last year.

We always watch each other and thankfully we do. Over the last few years improvements to football games for consumers have been great. We had a long period of stagnation where PES had no serious rival in terms of gameplay and FIFA had no serious rival in terms of licences and marketing spends. We are now both working on the same sort of things, and that’s having a great effect.”

This year’s PES sees the Konami team focus on gameplay and player AI as the studio looks to rebuild the series’ reputation.

We were falling into the trap that other people were falling into, which was producing a game that was great but was losing something in terms of gameplay. Perhaps it was a little tedious in its attempts to recreate football.

The AI has massively improved for this version and the result is a gameplay experience that is extremely satisfying. Satisfaction is something we feel we have lost over the years.”