Pro Evolution Soccer Changed Its Name To eFootball PES 2020

During E3 2019, Konami announced that their long-running game Pro Evolution Soccer will be called eFootball PES 2020. A lot of fans were surprised about the decision and now Konami explains why they had done it.

Lennart Bobzien, the European Brand Manager of the game told Gamespot that the new title shows their intention of having a “bigger focus on esports moving forward”. Also, he did say that they had different competitions in the past but this year, they plan to have bigger esports competitions for the game.

Bobzien also explained that the previous title was not a good fit for their intended market, “Talking about Pro Evolution Soccer in Europe, it was always a tricky one, and when we discussed this repositioning we thought, lets call it football, it’s a European market [so] we want to have football”, he further adds, “we still keep PES in the product name since we feel that’s still part of the heritage and we want to keep it in there”.

Another thing that is changing in the series is the game’s lack of licenses which is actually their biggest flaw. A lot would agree that Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer is the better football sim, but since EA’s FIFA had licensed teams and leagues, they were the bigger seller. For this year’s game, Manchester United was officially licensed for PES 2020 and will have the cover star as Scott McTominay in some regions. This could possibly be a step towards getting more licensing deals for the series.

eFootball PES 2020 will be launching on September 10, 2019, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. A demo will also be available on July 30th which will feature online and offline mods and also the game’s edit mode.