Konami’s disastrous eFootball 2022 launch is a tragedy

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Ten years ago, EA recklessly attempted to reboot its NBA Live basketball franchise, which was then emerging from one of its most successful entries to date. The result was NBA Elite, an entry so bad that it effectively killed the franchise while ceding the video game basketball market entirely to NBA 2K.

At the time, NBA 2K was a critically acclaimed basketball simulation – NBA 2K11 is often called one of the best sports games ever made – but it didn’t take long for the lack of competition to take hold. an effect on the deductible. These days, the positives of NBA 2K22 are buried under an avalanche of product placements and microtransactions. Without competition, 2K has little incentive to change its ways, even though fans take to sites like Metacritic to express their displeasure.

Step into Konami’s eFootball 2022, Pro Evolution Soccer’s latest reboot attempt, born Winning Eleven, this time as a free football simulation. The results, to say the least, have not been good. With its weird issues, mediocre character models, and zombie-like crowds, Konami eFootball 2022 is effectively a pre-alpha version masquerading as a finished product. Adding insult to injury, last year’s outing was treated as a placeholder game, with fans urged to sit still for an even better outing on the road. The backlash has been intense – Konami eFootball 2021 is one of the lowest rated Steam games of all time.

But if it’s easy to laugh at Konami eFootball’s horrible versions of Messi and Ronaldo, it’s also hard not to feel sad. Unless there is a monumental return to the level of No Man’s Sky, or Barcelona against PSG, Konami’s football franchise is more or less dead on arrival. This gives FIFA an open field, depriving it even of a semblance of competition.

“Last nail in the coffin for PES, a sad day for all of us since now EA really has no competition with FIFA and it is [sic] Ultimate team [b*llshit]”wrote a Reddit commentator on the day Konami eFootball was released.

Another wrote: “Yes, it is [f*cking] evisceration, PES was once again a legitimate competitor to FIFA and I had high hopes that this next release was going to be the crossover once again for PES to be the best game … and then I heard about the platform- free cross shape. with the phones thing, and it’s as bad as I feared … “

It is a spooky landscape if you are a sports fan; a wasteland of incremental updates, glitchy gameplay, and heavily monetized game modes.

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To be fair, PES was bad competition even before the Konami eFootball debacle. The last really awesome PES game was arguably Pro Evolution Soccer 6 of 2006, which saw the light of day a few years before FIFA introduced Ultimate Team and became the juggernaut it is today. Since then, PES and FIFA have largely gone in opposite directions, with FIFA becoming a truly global mega-franchise while PES has regressed to become more of a regional competitor. In a separate thread, a Reddit commenter judged FIFA’s real competitor to be Fortnite.

“FUT has propelled FIFA into a new market and now competes with other major entertainment IPs built around supported services. I’m sure the development team is always keeping an eye on PES for ideas and ideas. inspiration, but EA now doesn’t care what PES does, besides getting annoyingly nagging a license here and there, ”they wrote.

Still, PES has had its moments. Over the past few years, PES has experienced a mini-renaissance, supported by arguably superior gameplay and a broader backlash against FIFA Ultimate Team. Its lack of licensing was offset by a strong user community that made it easy to download kits and logos that would replace the generic in-game placeholders. It was barely enough to overtake FIFA, which grossed around a billion dollars last year, but for those fed up with EA’s sweaty pace and loot box mechanics, this wasn’t a bad alternative.

With Konami eFootball 2022, however, it looks like Konami wasted all of its hard-earned momentum, as what could have been a big release instead turned into dozens of mocking memes. While that doesn’t ultimately spell the end of the series, it’s certainly a missed opportunity to generate some much-needed excitement.

In the short term, at least, that means virtually none of the major sports sims have a notable competitor. MLB: The Show, NBA 2K, Madden, NHL, and FIFA all dominate their respective sports – a far cry from when the sports market was filled with tough competitors like NFL 2K and MVP Baseball. Classic arcade sports games like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are long gone, replaced by mobile sports titles focused on microtransactions. It is a spooky landscape if you are a sports fan; a wasteland of incremental updates, glitchy gameplay, and heavily monetized game modes. The tragedy of Konami eFootball is not necessarily that it had a chance to supplant FIFA but that it failed; is that it’s so emblematic of the state of sports games in general.

With no alternative in the sports games space to push it in a positive direction, FIFA is likely to continue as it did in the previous generation, happy to release updates with little obvious pressure to really improve. All he has to do is focus on maximizing revenue, which he can accomplish by pushing FIFA Ultimate Team players even harder, aware that they have nowhere to go for their football fix. In such an environment, the only real alternative is Football Manager.

Some fans are hoping Konami can make a difference, with patch lists and other constructive feedback. Konami apologized for the state of eFootball at launch and promised fixes.

If he can at least achieve parity with previous games, eFootball’s status as a free football simulation might be enough to grab a real audience for it and start pushing FIFA. But for now, EA’s soccer juggernaut has no competition, and that’s bad for everyone except EA.

Kat Bailey is Senior News Editor at IGN.



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