Konami Talks About Cross-play, Autumn Demo, And Battle Passes For eFootball

You've probably got questions about the transition of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer to eFootball. Some of those were answered in the initial announcement a couple of weeks ago, but in case you needed more info, Konami provided a rapid-fire Q&A via Twitter yesterday, posing and answering a bunch of questions about the next installment of its sports title.

Initially designed for consoles, eFootball will "take full advantage of the hardware capabilities of each supported device," with some "graphical adjustments" needed for mobile devices. Cross-platform matchmaking can be disabled at will. The "early autumn" section of the roadmap is being treated effectively as a demo. It will include matches against AI teams and there will be no microtransactions.

Edit mode will be added for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC after release as a free update, while Master League functionality will be premium DLC.

As for the final tweet in the chain, it sounds like it describes a kind of battle pass, with both free and paid elements. Since I'm not intimately familiar with PES's previous model, or European football as a whole, I'll reproduce it below and let you figure out its finer nuances:

Q: Can you sign players without special agents?

A: Previous games had a strong “lottery element”, but eFootball™ lets you nominate and acquire your favourite players with Match Pass, a system to receive items based on matches played. Free & Paid Match Passes will be available.

— eFootball (@play_eFootball) August 2, 2021

Konami said that there's "much more to follow this month" in terms of announcements about eFootball, so expect to hear more about the game's features in the coming weeks.