EA Sports FIFA Owes Success to Pro Evolution Soccer

The FIFA series from EA Sports might be the most popular football simulation on the market, but at least one developer believes that much of its current success is owed to the rival Pro Evolution Soccer series that Konami is publishing.

Jon Murphy, who is a team leader working on the next iteration of PES, has told Eurogamer during an interview that, “We’ve always had a product quality lead on them, but we’ve never overtaken them in sales. 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.”

The game creator admitted that PES had its issues, but then reassured players that the team has rebuilt the game from the ground up and there’s currently little difference in quality between it and FIFA.

Murphy added, “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.”

PES initially innovated in the field of football simulation and FIFA copied in order to catch up and, since then, the two series have gone into different directions that offer experiences suited for a varied array of players.

The developer also expressed a hope that FIFA will not be in the dominant position forever.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 will introduce more options for player control and the Konami team also says that simulation for actual players will be better than ever.

FIFA 13 is also evolving over last year’s edition and EA Sports says that it will be making mistakes a bigger part of the game, persuading gamers to find out the strong and the weak spots for all their players.

Via: EA Sports FIFA Owes Success to Pro Evolution Soccer