The most important thing in this kind of Live Service/Free to Play/ Pay to win/ of games is the content and modes, releasing a Mbappé card every week with a different background... it's not content. You can't just rely on the gambling nature of gamers to make money, that is why more and more games for the last months that are Live Service are failing, with many as Marvel Adventures, Apex Legends and Battlefield mobile games closing and terminating.
At the moment, the only platform that has any figures for active players is Steam, and let's look at the numbers there and do some basic arithmetic. eFootball has averaged 3,300 active players per month over its lifetime. Yes, the first months were very bad, they bring the number down a lot, and yes in the last months there are more active players, around 5-6000 AP, but in comparison,
PES 2021 during its entire life 10.2020 - 08.2022 has an average of 7800 active players per month, but here too to be fair we have to say that the last year, or for the last 8 months of the game lowers the figure significantly, there are about 3000 active players per month, while in the rest of the time in 2021 almost the whole year, the game had 10000 players.
Long story short, they are killing/removing all PES games from digital stores, just to push people to your new stupid eFootball mini-game, so let's see the numbers again, you have an average of 3300 AP (free game) vs 7800 AP (paid game).To me, this is a spectacular failure.
Even with simple arithmetic and assumptions, we can come up with some figures for the money they eventually make. for this purpose, to make things look better for Konami, let's ignore the first months of the game, the numbers are really bad there, and take only the last year.
As we said this has an average of 5000 active people per month, from this 5000 AP, lest say 10% invest 10 euros every month for coins, That's 5,000 € per month, which makes 60,000 € per year from Steam.
Let's say that eFootball is ten times bigger for consoles that would mean that Konami makes ten times more money there, which would be around 600,000 € per year... these are grossly insufficient if you ask me! Server maintenance alone will eat up a large portion of that money, not to mention the team working on the game, marketing, license, and the percentage they have to pay to the digital market platforms and Epic Games for the engine.
Yes, this is just speculation on my part and not including the mobile version, unless it is twice or 3 times bigger than the console version, and they have 1,000.000 active players, which makes 100,000 € PM, its around 1.2 mil € per year, but let's say that Konami at best makes an average of 2 million € per year from ALL platforms, IN BEST CASE from eFootball, I don't think it will be enough... they need at least ten times more to justify the existence of the game, ЕА might make two billion in the last year just from FIFA...
I could be wrong of course. There may be more deluded people who throw away 100-1000 euros for coins every month. But I personally doubt it, the people who did this are mostly content creators or streamers.
Now the big question is... was it worth it Konami!? Was it worth killing the entire series, the entire legacy that was built over 25 years, and losing the trust and respect of both your fans and everyone in the industry!? .. of course, this is a rhetorical question! We all know the answer.
I don't think the question "Is eFootball dying" is correct. Rather, the question should be, "when"?
