Pro Evolution Soccer has been playing second fiddle to FIFA for a good few years now and Konami’s and PES team leader Jon Murphy has had enough of it, not least because he believes that the current popularity of the FIFA franchise and it’s many layers of innovation are down to PES.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Murphy spoke about how FIFA’s lead on PES is undeserved.
“There’s a certain amount of work they’ve done very well on PR to convince people that the gap is bigger than it actually is,” Murphy said.
FIFA, he added, owes a considerable debt to PES.
“I also think we don’t get enough recognition for the way we tend to innovate still and [the FIFA team] do still tend to follow a lot of what we do,” Murphy said.
“If you look further back into the past of PES you can see they’ve obviously gone from a game that was totally different from PES to one that started copying PES to one that started taking areas PES did well further into the product they have now.”
“People shouldn’t forget that’s how they got where they are. You can give them loads of credit for how they’ve got to where they got to now, and you can see it as a totally valuable product in its own right that does have ideas we can all learn from, but we shouldn’t forget that PES innovated all of this stuff and they did copy it,” he said.
“In many cases it must be coincidental. But then you do see them reacting to what we’ve done last year quite naturally. For example, this year they’re talking about the AI and gameplay as being a key force, which is exactly what we were dealing with last year as a key feature. That’s not a coincidence, I’m sure.”
PES 13 drops this Autumn. So does FIFA 13. Game on.
