[dropcap]E[/dropcap]A Sports’ FIFA franchise is quite possibly THE sports game franchise. Despite a certain lack of attention paid to it by the gaming press (gametrailers.com hasn’t even reviewed the latest instalment), the videogame adaptation of the beautiful game has arguably been the foundation for the all-conquering success of its publisher. The cult surrounding each yearly iteration of the game is met with the same surprising amount of zealous celebration, as its average of 10 million units sold per annum would suggest. Starting in 1993, the game has even become prevalent among the soccer elite it digitises, with the world’s coolest footballer, Andrea Pirlo, boasting of his daily marathon FIFA sessions, even stating that he spent the entire day of the 2006 World Cup Final playing the soccer simulator before winning the Jules Rimet trophy that evening.

This popular phenomenon had resulted in HMV holding a midnight launch of the game (which was rather tame); with a small, almost entirely male group outside either standing around awkwardly, or reclining on fold-up chairs in alternating Nike and Adidas clothing, while inside a store manager type wore a full Irish kit and an incongruously large, Afro wig — all waiting for midnight to come. For the customers, it meant a chance to play an updated, and hopefully improved version of last year’s game; for videogame retailers, it meant their best chance to get their finances into the black. And that they certainly did, with at least two of the after-dark queuers buying not just the game but an Xbox One as well — which means that they spent at least €580 in one night. And all to play one single game. While consoles are usually marketed with the promise of exclusive games, an omni-platform series that as of last year was still being published on the archaic PS2 is what will make the larger “casual” gaming audience cough up the heavy cash.
Interestingly though, the FIFA games are developed in an inconsistent fashion and constantly struggle with a sense of stasis due to their yearly re-iterations. EA have tried to ignore this by hyping new features so as to distract from what has stayed the same. Noticeably, certain “new” features seem to get repeated, such as dribbling mechanics that give you “full control” of your player, or “smarter” goalkeepers, yet these promises are repeated and re-hashed almost bianually, often to lukewarm or negligible results. FIFA 14’s main selling point was a new level of dribbling control, which unfortunately turned out sluggish and unresponsive, making 14 this writer’s subjective nadir for the series. The current edition — despite no major hype — has fantastic dribbling, while the promised “smart” goalies have been ridiculed by the hours of YouTube footage of keepers performing inhuman mistakes such as dropping a ball back into their own net or standing still and watching a far-out aerial shot slowly float past them in to the goal.

While these might sound like the unpredictable moments that football has enshrined its popularity in, their strangely consistent occurrences in the game has led to fans crying foul, especially since it’s at their own expense. It’s rare to see such consistent complaining (and the particularities of the complaints don’t often change, as with each game it seems that where one problem is fixed, another is ignored) yet still the same unflagging popularity.
In the end, this is the true phenomenon of FIFA — its ability to continually sell as much as it does despite the series’ unstable quality. A large part of this unswerving loyalty is due to the inability of their nearest competitor, Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, to gain a licensing deal with Premier League clubs. Essentially, they are unable — due to EA’s vast monopolising of said licensing — to have Liverpool Football Club be in the game under the name “Liverpool Football Club”, but instead have the pseudonym of “Merseyside Red”. This is the case with a lot of the biggest teams, but PES has always had a small but loyal fanbase due to their immersive controls and generally superior rendition of football in a video game. It prides itself as a football “simulator”, holding verisimilitude to be key even if it gives the game a hard learning curve, while FIFA has more “arcade” like gameplay, prizing accessibility above all else. Again and again, if asked whether they would stop buying FIFA, the disgruntled and vitriolic fan will say, “No”, and point to the all-importance of licences in their playing experience. This seemingly frivolous emphasis on presentation though is vital to the series’ rivalry: playing the most recent version of FIFA is now identical to watching Sky Sports, meanwhile PES suffers from a stuffy, awkward presentation that greatly jars with the intuitive gameplay.

However, PES 2015 has already picked up “Sports Game of the Year Award” at Gamescom, and reaction to its recently released demo suggest that it will be able to re-launch its success after lagging behind FIFA over the last generation. Back in 2005, PES5 was a game of such unparalleled brilliance that it was able to establish itself as a more sympathetic alternative to FIFA’s ruthless monopoly, but as time went on FIFA only managed to gain significant ground with the advent of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, where Konami floundered with the new tech. Yet, there is hope that if PES is able to attract the attention of a football gaming community more animated about tactics than club names, later iterations of both games could see a crumbling of the monopoly. With the current animosity in the gaming community towards the big publishers — especially EA — we might well see the start of a new phenomenon in gaming: the moderate success of the little guy. If FIFA doesn’t attend to its persistent flaws, PES would be able to grow as, if not a FIFA killer, a monopoly killer.