In a frank interview with Eurogamer, Konami’s Jon Murphy has criticized FIFA of copying the strong points of PES, and has mentioned that they will bounce back this year and the reputation PES has of playing second-fiddle to FIFA is unfair.
“There’s a certain amount of work they’ve done very well on PR to convince people that the gap is bigger than it actually is,” Murphy said.
“I also think we don’t get enough recognition for the way we tend to innovate still and [the FIFA team] do still tend to follow a lot of what we do.
“If you look further back into the past of PES you can see they’ve obviously gone from a game that was totally different from PES to one that started copying PES to one that started taking areas PES did well further into the product they have now.”
He said that he considers FIFA to be a strong franchise but people shouldn’t forget that PES was behind their success.
“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.”
A lot of frustration can be seen from his comments, but he does have a point. Tell us what you think in the comments section below.