Konami has revealed Pro Evolution Soccer has undergone a name change and will be going free-to-play later this year.
FIFA has been the leader in football video games for almost 30 years. Every now and again, Pro Evolution Soccer has attempted to dethrone the virtual football giant but has been unable to do so. However, Pro Evo's upcoming overhaul may well change all that. Konami has announced a number of details about what's next for Pro Evo, including a name change.
Going forward, Pro Evo will now be called eFootball. The name change is pretty low down on the totem pole when ranking how impactful these new changes are going to be, though. Efootball will launch this autumn and be completely free to play across all platforms. New-gen, old-gen, PCs, and mobile, and by the end of the year, cross-play will be supported across all of those platforms.
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Konami has also announced it will be scrapping annual releases, a staple for pretty much all sports games for the past two decades or more. Instead, eFootball will receive regular updates, presumably to keep rosters up to date and also to add new teams into the mix. Efootball will only have nine playable clubs at launch, but Pro Evo's popular Option Files will remain, allowing you to customize and create your own clubs, crests, and kits.
Players will be able to compete in exhibition matches at launch with the option of buying other modes via DLC. What those modes will be exactly is yet to be revealed. It sounds like you will effectively be able to build your very own football game. Picking and choosing the modes you're interested in and even creating whatever unlicensed clubs you want to use.
Efootball will also feature something called Match Pass, which sounds very much like a football version of a BR Battle Pass. The roadmap between eFootball's launch and the end of 2021 can be found above. Konami has promised more news on what's to come at the end of August, which lines up with Gamescom 2021, so expect an announcement and possibly even a trailer at some point over the course of that weekend.
Source: IGN
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