The PES franchise hasn’t been ”given proper respect” for returning to quality, said Murphy, because ”so many have bought” into EA’s PR. Also EA ‘copy’ the PES formula.
Frankly it used to be the other way around, he noted. The PES boss is frustrated that despite all their advancements public opinion has been ‘bought’ by the FIFA series.
”You can talk about two things: the quality of the product and the sales of the product,” said Jon Murphy in an interview when asked about the huge gap in UK sales between PES and FIFA.
”In terms of the sales of the product, clearly EA has been pulling right away from us. To be fair, if you look directly at the UK, we’ve never had a lead on them.”
”We’ve always had a product quality lead on them, but we’ve never overtaken them in sales. There’s always been a sales gap. The sales gap has grown in the UK. That’s obvious. It’s partly due to the quality of the product, which we’ve been improving and now stacks up easily against FIFA with this version.”
”But it’s also to do with the money spent on marketing and the money spent to lock us out of licenses.”
Murphy is pulling no punches and clearly expresses his thoughts on EA ‘greasing palms’: ”Opinion has turned against PES in a way that’s been helped along that isn’t necessarily born out by the quality of the product recently.”
”There was a period of dissatisfaction with the product with good reason - several years - where we didn’t know where we were going. But recently the quality of the product has come back, and I don’t think we’ve been given proper respect for that because so many have bought into the idea that FIFA is better, just in the same way people bought into the idea PES was much better than FIFA in years gone by, and it took a while for them to get out of that situation because it was so ingrained. We’re now seeing the opposite’s true. There’s an automatic assumption now that FIFA is just better.”
There’s a double standard at play, laments Murphy; PES is a screw-up while FIFA is a saint.
”For example, if you look at satisfaction with online experience, we get a lot of complaints from people saying they’re not happy with the lag in PES, and that FIFA has perfect online play. We all know if you play FIFA online you have a whole series of problems. I’m not saying we’re better online or they’re better online, but the opinion swung around to put us under the microscope more than them these days. I also think we don’t get enough recognition for the way we tend to innovate still and they do still tend to follow a lot of what we do.”
EA are copying what Konami has done with PES, says Murphy.
”I wouldn’t say they are actively doing that right now,” he clarified. ”I’m saying they have a long history of copying PES to get to where they want to be. 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.”
”…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.”
Check out the full interview between Jon Murphy and Eurogamer.
Let’s compare last year’s PES 2012 with this year’s FIFA 13 trailer; any similarities done there?
