Konami keeping an eye on FIFA as long as EA keeps watch of PES

“We keep an eye on them as they keep an eye on us. If you look at what they announced recently in their videos you will see that a number of the things they are doing this year we were doing last year. We always watch each other and thankfully we do. Over the last few years improvements to football games for consumers have been great. We had a long period of stagnation where PES had no serious rival in terms of gameplay and FIFA had no serious rival in terms of licences and marketing spends. We are now both working on the same sort of things, and that’s having a great effect. We were falling into the trap that other people were falling into, which was producing a game that was great but was losing something in terms of gameplay. Perhaps it was a little tedious in its attempts to recreate football. The AI has massively improved for this version and the result is a gameplay experience that is extremely satisfying. Satisfaction is something we feel we have lost over the years.” - Pro Evo team leader Jon Murphy

Sounds like fighting words to me! I wonder if EA is going to react to this with a statement.

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