According to a new rumour, Konami might be making its flagship football series PES "properly free to play", possibly starting with this year's entry.
This rumour comes courtesy of VGC's Andy Robinson, who appeared on the VGC Off The Record podcast to discuss some of the recent rumours surrounding games like Dead Space.
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On the podcast, Andy turned the discussion towards Konami, saying, "Konami are flickering to life and there's also gonna be new stuff with PES this year I hear. They are gonna go properly free-to-play and really change it up this year".
Andy continues to say that the upcoming change to free to play is the reasoning behind why Konami randomly released a network test for PES 2022 just last week titled New Football Game. That was advertised as a stress test for the network, but it's seemingly related to PES going free to play.
Since this rumour has come out, many fans have praised the idea of a yearly sports title being a constantly updated free to play service, although it's not likely that it'll pass on. PES doesn't have the same licencing fees that FIFA does, which would make it a lot harder for that game to be made free.
PES has already been making moves in this direction over the past year, not only offering a lite version of the game that is completely free, but also offering content updates in place of a full yearly release.
A previous rumour on ResetEra indicated that PES might be being rebranded to "eFootball", which could line up with the idea that it is going free to play. If the game is going to completely switch gears and go fully free to play, it would make sense for a complete rebrand.
PES is currently branded as "eFootball PES", so it's not too far of a stretch for them to just cut out PES and focus all in on eFootball. That rumour was substantiated by the discovery of several new logos for the game that remove PES and simply say "eFootball".
