how Konami has revived the fortunes of eFootball

Making a chronicle of the vicissitudes of eFootball, the brand that has collected the heavy legacy of PES, can be a probative exercise. The game has been through a lot since it released last year, first presenting itself to the public with an untitled beta, which fans thought would not be representative in terms of graphics and gameplay, and then with a practically 0.9 version identical – in the (little) good and in the bad.

Since then, from the times in which there were those who liked to define it as psychological horror due to the disconcerting facial animations of the footballers and those in which the contents had to be searched for with the lantern, a lot of water has passed under the bridge: version 1.0, the seasons, the launch of eFootball 2023, the new licenses.

It won’t be perfect, but things have improved dramatically. “When you make the first move and you are a pioneer, as we specifically were, it is always a challenge,” says David Monk, senior partnerships and activations manager of eFootball for Konami. “It was a new engine, we are now on Unreal Engine, and this has been a monumental change in development, […] and the second big change was the business model, going free-to-play. A really big step, because, all of a sudden, there was no longer a physical product. Just a digital product: we wanted to make sure it was accessible for everyone, and that there were no barriers to entry for users”.

From Winning Eleven to eFootball —

With EA Sports left to dominate the football arena for several years, a big challenge in this relaunch has been the licensing discourse – acquiring new ones to appeal to players, giving them a signal that Konami was there, and that they would find representation there for the clubs they love. “That was the next step, making sure we had new licenses and new partnerships to really launch eFootball into our new era and new platform.”

“So there were many different variables, it wasn’t just a rebrand, because a rebrand in itself is already very complex for any company – going from a franchise like PES that has been around for more than twenty years, and as it was known in Asia (Winning Eleven). The rebrand was an opportunity to launch a unique product on a global scale, and now it doesn’t matter if you are in Japan or Italy, it will have the same name everywhere in the world”.

Throwing mistakes

Monk recalls the stages that led to the game we know today, at this point: “new engine, new licenses, new partnerships, new business model”. And his idea is that “of course there will always be multiple challenges when you take steps as new and innovative as ours. But the biggest challenge was to release the game in version 0.9 and meet the expectations of the community. Which we didn’t do.”

“At that point, the most important thing was to listen to the community, which we didn’t. For the first time we conducted consumer surveys, received user feedback and implemented some changes. We have developed the game significantly from 0.9 to 1.0, released in April. And then, since then, we’ve had a roadmap with updates culminating in eFootball 2023. With that, we now have a complete free-to-play game.”

And, it may seem strange, but the basic idea at Konami was that things went exactly the way they did. Maybe with fewer bugs, but with a gradual growth that would lead to where we are today with eFootball. “With a platform that sounds so digital, it gives us the chance to evolve and develop without having to rely on an annual physical product release. So, ultimately, every challenge and every obstacle that may arise, we can overcome them with the business model and with the new development structure that we have,” he adds.

More licenses coming? —

While parts of the roadmap are not yet very defined, such as that relating to the paid Master League, Konami is happy with the partnerships it has already acquired and aims to have more, both in our country and in the rest of the world. “We have been very, very active, very, very busy in Italy as you can see, with seven partnerships in your country. And my job, since I joined Konami three and a half years ago, was to build a strategy to see how we could deal with a very competitive landscape in the football simulation category,” explains Monk.

“How could we compete in Europe, and for me the affinity between Japan and Italy and the other Latin European countries was not immediately clear to me, especially because Japanese fans love Italian football”, and above all the way in which it is played from our parts instead of the faster and more spectacular Premier League which FIFA explicitly points to – this explains many things in the gameplay of PES first, and then eFootball. “They always have and we are seeing it even now with Nagatomo in Qatar, and this created a perfect basis to say, ok, how can we invest in Italy? And how can we create a competitive advantage through partnerships and licenses?”.

With seven partner clubs – Milan, Inter, Naples, Rome, Lazio, Atalanta and Monza -, the Japanese house considers itself “very competitive now”, so “we are happy with what we have. And, if you look at the table in Italy, you will notice that the biggest clubs and the best clubs at the moment are partners of Konami. And it didn’t happen by accident, we planned it, built a strategy for two years and executed it. And this gave us the perfect basis to create this project with a landscape of exclusive licenses and top-level partners”.

The eFootball of the future —

And for the game itself, instead – what are the main areas on which Konami is aiming to grow and improve eFootball 2023? The answers in this sense are a little more vague, the fans have their opinions and the development team seems willing to listen to them all and then draw their own personal conclusions, filtered each time through the constant cadence of updates.

“We are listening, we are improving, we are developing”, comments Monk in this regard, who underlines Konami’s pioneering choice to hold regular consumer surveys among enthusiasts to find out what they want from the game. “What fans want is to have the chance to represent their club, which is why we created a competition like this. [la Coppa eFootball Italia] to go hand in hand with the question, ‘what aspects of development can we improve’?”.

Knowing the passion of the Italians and, in general, of the users for the game itself – its fiber, the fundamental mechanics, more than for an export scene that is constantly growing but in any case parallel to the love for gaming commonly understood -, we are sure that more than a cup, they would like to see modes, teams and content. It seems that the ‘new’ Konami has some ideas on this too, now all that remains is to see them applied, hopefully, in a challenging 2023.