The disastrous launch of Konami eFootball 2022 is a tragedy

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Ten years ago, EA recklessly tried to restart its NBA Live basketball franchise, which was then coming off one of its most successful innings to date. The result was NBA Elite, an entry so bad that it effectively killed the franchise and completely ceded the video game basketball market to NBA 2K.

At the time, NBA 2K was a critically acclaimed basketball simulator (NBA 2K11 is often said to be one of the best sports games ever made), but the lack of competition didn’t take long to affect the franchise. 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 forms, even when fans visit sites like Metacritic to express their displeasure.

Enter Konami’s eFootball 2022, the latest attempt to reboot Pro Evolution Soccer, from née Winning Eleven, this time as a free soccer simulator. The results, to put it mildly, have not been good. With its bizarre glitches, poor character models, and zombie-like crowds, Konami eFootball 2022 is effectively a pre-alpha release in disguise as a finished product. To add insult to injury, last year’s pitch was treated as a placeholder game, and fans were asked to sit back for an even better pitch down the road. The reaction has been intense: Konami eFootball 2021 is one of the worst-reviewed Steam games of all time.

But while it’s easy to laugh at Konami eFootball’s horrible versions of Messi and Ronaldo, it is also difficult not to feel sad. Barring a monumental comeback at the level of No Man’s Sky, or Barcelona against PSG, Konami’s soccer franchise is more or less dead upon arrival. This gives FIFA a clear field, depriving it even of the appearance of competition.

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

Another wrote, “Yes, this is [f*cking] gutted, PES had once again become a legitimate FIFA competitor and I had high hopes that this next version would be the crossover once again to make PES the best game … and then I heard about free multiplatform with phones, and it’s as bad as I feared … “

It is a gloomy landscape if you are a sports fanatic; a wasteland of incremental updates, buggy gameplay, and heavily monetized game modes.

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To be fair, PES was poor competition even before the Konami eFootball debacle. The last really cool PES game was possibly Pro Evolution Soccer 6 from 2006, which was released a few years before FIFA introduced Ultimate Team and became the behemoth 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 a more regional competitor. In a separate thread, a Reddit commenter opined that the real competitor to FIFA is Fortnite.

“FUT launched FIFA into a new market and is now competing with other major entertainment IPs built around sustained services. I’m sure the development team is still looking to PES for ideas and inspiration, but EA isn’t looking forward to it. it matters now what PES does, besides getting a license annoyingly here or there “, they wrote.

Still, PES has had its moments. In recent years, PES has enjoyed a mini-renaissance, fueled by arguably superior gameplay and the broader backlash against FIFA Ultimate Team. Its lack of licenses was made up for by a strong user community that made it easy to download kits and logos that would replace generic in-game placeholders. It was hardly enough to beat FIFA, which raised somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars last year, but for those tired of EA’s sweaty pace and loot box mechanics, it wasn’t a bad alternative. .

However, with Konami eFootball 2022, it seems that Konami has wasted all of its hard-earned momentum as what could have been a great launch has turned into dozens of mocking memes. Even if it doesn’t end up being a knockout for the series, it’s certainly a missed opportunity to generate much-needed excitement.

In the short term, at least, this means that virtually none of the major sports simulators have any prominent competitors. MLB: The Show, NBA 2K, Madden, NHL, and FIFA dominate their respective sports, a far cry from the days when the sports market was filled with solid competitors like NFL 2K and MVP Baseball. Classic arcade sports games like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are long gone, and were effectively replaced by microtransaction-powered mobile sports titles. It is a gloomy landscape if you are a sports fanatic; a wasteland of incremental updates, buggy gameplay, and heavily monetized game modes. The tragedy of Konami eFootball is not necessarily that it had the opportunity to impersonate FIFA, but it failed; is that it is so emblematic of the state of sports games in general.

With no alternatives in the sports games space to propel it in a positive direction, FIFA can continue as it has for the past generation, happy to release updates with little overt pressure to genuinely improve. You just need to focus on maximizing revenue, which you can achieve by squeezing even more FIFA Ultimate Team players, knowing they have nowhere to go for their soccer fix. In such an environment, the only real alternative is Football Manager.

Some fans hold out hope that Konami can turn things around, publishing suggested lists of fixes and other constructive feedback. Konami apologized for the state of eFootball at launch and promised solutions.

If you can at least achieve parity with previous games, eFootball’s status as a free soccer sim could be enough to gain a real audience and start pushing FIFA forward. But for now, the soccer giant EA has no competition, and that’s bad for everyone but EA.

Kat Bailey is a senior news editor at IGN.



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