Today, the world of soccer video games has a true and undisputed king in the form of the EA Sports FC series, but not that long ago, this was not the case. At its peak, the Pro Evolution Soccer series was a worthy challenger, and one which many fans backed as the preferable option, despite some challenges like poor licensing deals that might have killed off lesser series more quickly.
So, what happened to take a series like PES from many sports gamers’ favorite to an afterthought, watching EA bask in the benefits of winning the long virtual footie war? These are the key troubles that Konami and PES simply could not overcome in the end.
Fox Engine’s Early Struggles
The fall of PES is not a story that comes down to one major misstep that sunk the brand and ceded the battle, but rather a series of missteps from a brand that could not afford nearly as many as it ultimately made. Every time a new game in the series had a new flaw or hurdle to overcome, another sliver of the fanbase would be peeled off and transferred over to EA and, in most cases, never to return to the underdog again.
The first major hiccup came in the move to the proprietary Fox Engine for the series. A preferable on-pitch experience was often one of the primary appeals fans cited when choosing PES over FIFA, but this switch proved disastrous for some. For all the positive changes it brought, the engine also struggled to run at high frame rates, which is a major problem for sports games with fine timing and fast reactions. While performance on the engine improved with experience, it presented a major halt in the series’ momentum.
Stagnation Sets In
The next contributing factor that eroded the goodwill and market share of PES is a tale as old as annual sports gaming: Stagnation. While the competition was always refining and adjusting visual presentation, at times too far in the other direction, the presentation and graphic experience with PES stalled out and soon began to feel antiquated.
While this can be less of a problem for experienced players of the series who were used to the look and feel and loved their game, this made the game less appealing to new players, as it could come off as outdated. While maintaining your existing audience is critical to success as a sports gaming franchise, there will always be some level of fall-off from fans opting to buy new editions less often or moving on from gaming altogether. It’s critical to keep appealing to new players to replace these losses, and the outdated feel of PES made the task more challenging.
Licensing Woes Build Until Critical Mass
The biggest thing FIFA always had going in its favor was the strong advantage in the licensing game. While PES struggled with licensing and opted to rely on the series’ strong modding community to allow fans to quickly and easily download mods to make the game feature more realistic looks and names, by default, the majority of the world’s biggest leagues only existed in generic forms.
This was true throughout the series’ glory days, too, and was not on its own enough to be a death knell, but over time grew to be more and more of a problem. Modding limitations on Xbox consoles meant that the series was suddenly without one of its biggest fan-made boosts for a portion of its audience, while EA continued to dominate in acquiring rights, often exclusively, to domestic leagues around the world.
The biggest blow came with the loss of the Champions League license and associated branding. When PES was the place to go for officially-licensed Champions League action, it gave the brand one huge arrow in its quiver. Players of the series could take in the pomp and circumstance of Champions League football, while gamers on FIFA may have had realistic club branding but were only able to recreate the Champions League in off-brand, generic forms. After a decade of being the exclusive video game home to the sport’s most prestigious club competition, the license transferred over to EA and FIFA as the final trophy in its licensing dominance plan.
The FIFA Brand Grows Too Strong
While it was tied to other brands in the form of club and league licensing that held back PES’s growth for so much of Konami’s time going toe-to-toe with EA, the brand struggles didn’t end at those acquired. Just as those association licenses came with the cultural cache of official branding, the names of video game series often take on their own cultural value.
This is why, despite the developer formerly having games across a range of sports, the phrase 2K is now synonymous with basketball video games, and Madden remains the only choice for NFL games despite the former broadcaster having stopped contributing to the game’s commentary long before his passing.
On this front, FIFA carried the day by a mile compared to PES, to such an extent that EA officials openly joked that when you used the term in America the person you said it to was far more likely to think of the video game series than the governing body it was named after, even if the latter controlled the most popular sport on Earth. The name brand FIFA was so strong that it handed an inherent edge to EA with each cycle, which is why it maintained that branding until PES had abandoned its own brand and no longer presented as a credible threat.
eFootball Lands With A Thud
No trend in gaming has launched more false hope and failed games than the free-to-play format. For every Fortnite or Rocket League that manages to get the balance right — usually with the common element of keeping paid mechanics restricted to cosmetics to avoid the game-killing curse of pay-to-win play — there are dozens of failed free-to-play live service games that never found an audience or revenue stream.
In September 2021, the latest game from Konami dropped not as Pro Evolution Soccer, but instead as the free-to-play eFootball. If Konami’s place in the soccer market was hanging on by a thread, eFootball was a big pair of scissors severing it for good. Poor graphics, clunky gameplay, and pushback to the format shift resulted in a game that was widely panned across both the critic and gamer communities.
With the move, the transformation was finally complete. A series that once could, on a bad day, claim to be the best competition EA was forced to reckon with and, on good ones, the best soccer game of the year had instead transformed into an ugly, messy game trying to reach into players’ pockets. The competition was over, and EA had officially claimed full domain over the virtual version of international football just as it already had for American football.
