Pro Evolution Soccer will be renamed eFootball when it is launched in 2021

Konami’s soccer video game, known as Pro Evolution Soccer or Winning Eleven since 2001, is now simple eFootball. No PES, no numbering.

It is now also playable for free. And it was developed in Unreal Engine 4, another franchise company. (Of Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 until last year it was built using Konami’s Fox Engine, which was originally developed by Konami’s Kojima Productions for its Metal Gear franchise.)

So call Konami eFootball “a completely new football simulation platform ”instead of repeating and renaming PES. In 2019 the publisher added “eFootball” to the title of the series.

The six-minute debut trailer for eFootball – which is in development on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X as well as iOS and Android devices – presents the three best European clubs in the franchise: Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Juventus, the latter is exclusive for eFootball and does not appear in EA Sports’ FIFA series.

Konami used the new engine to rebuild the game and “create a one-on-one system that is incredibly exciting and, above all, realistic,” so the story in the trailer. This system is called Motion Matching and will be a feature of all versions of the game – the current generation of consoles and earlier.

But what a development roadmap published on Wednesday looks like, eFootball will appear in “early autumn” as a relatively simple title, with other systems, modes and functions that will be brought along later. Cross-platform gaming, for example, is promised in the reveal video, but it’s set to debut later this fall; Cross-platform matches for Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation and Xbox are slated to appear this winter. Cross-generational gaming on PlayStation and Xbox will be available at launch.

Image: Konami

As for eFootball‘s free-to-play component, backed by a Battle Pass system called Match Pass, which offers tiered rewards (or the ability to purchase the loot directly). Juventus, Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Barcelona will be available to all players free of charge at the start.

Konami also said it plans to sell “certain game modes” […] as an optional DLC, “which is likely to be a buy-in to the game’s career suite, provided the free-to-play component mirrors PES ‘old Master League mode.