PES Team has an apparently small size. It must be under 90-100 people, and it's known it's not enough in today's gaming to deliver a good experience in all aspects. This is not EA where there are thousands of people available to contribute in any product development.
Apart from that, this data brings me a comparison to another known game which suffered a "unfinished release" this gen: Gran Turismo 5 from Polyphony Digital.
Kaz Yamauchi and Co. always said that he prefers to develop all the game in-studio (car modeling, physics, tracks, sound, etc.) because he wants to control the whole process (this obviously excludes any possibility of relying on 3rd-party teams for anything). I always thought this is related to a culture thing, as Japanese people are very (maybe too) proud in some things, and they don't want anyone else involved in their work.
But this approach creates one problem: they become "Jack of all trades, master of none".
In this case, PES Team want to do all work themselves (even if it's not the right solution), but they clearly can't, so they have to prioritize some aspects over others. Even then they can't bring a finished product. Add the yearly update cycle football games have, and the outcome is the unbalanced feel PES 2014 has (enjoyable gameplay, terrible content).
I think there are 2 obvious options here to resolve this:
- Work with 3rd-party studios from other locations to manage some aspects (online environment, UI design, licenses, FX sound) while the main team focus on gameplay design. This involves the need for PES Team to open their minds a bit.
- Konami investing a lot of money on PES Team so they can sign more quality devs and stick to their japanese development paradigm. They have money in the bank, they're not a poor indie dev.
What do you think?