PES 2021 Denuvo Heartbeat Servers at Risk of Being Shut Down Before July 27 EU Ruling . Interesting Development To Follow!

[Prankster]

Hey guys,

Posting this here as this could decide the future of the PES 2021 Editing Section and most eyes are here.


So Ross Scott from the "Stop Killing Games" movement gave testimony a few days ago to the European Citizens Initiative. This was about the European Commission receiving the 1.29 million signatures for the "Stop Destroying Videogames" initiative on January 26, 2026 regarding games like PES 2021 that contain built-in kill switches.

As many of you know, PES 2021 relies on Denuvo heartbeat servers. If those servers are pulled, the game simply won't launch on your PC anymore. Based on typical licensing costs its estimated to cost Konami around €6,000/month to keep that authentication server running. It is safe to assume it won't be maintained forever, especially as efootball struggles to migrate the legacy player base.

This group have done some research and tracked approximately 1,100 titles like PES 2021 that unfortunately have kill switches and this group found that 93.5% have already been shut down and killed forever. PES 2021 is in the 6.5% of survivors.... but for how long when it costs so much to licence denuvo?

So now the EU Commission has until July 27th 2026 to decide whether to push forward with legislation that could outlaw "killing" games.
This is extremely interesting because 90% of the pes community play pes6 but 60% of modders like to work on PES 2021 because of its nicer graphics.


1. If this ruling passes and Konami do not take action. Does this put their eFootball DRM security into danger?


This puts Konami in a very tight corner now:

1. Their DRM security of eFootball. To make PES 2021 playable offline after a shutdown, Konami may be forced to release an official patch to strip out the Denuvo integration.... This is not only extra work for them, but its a massive security risk. Because it will provide a reference on removing Denuvo and this could compromise the DRM integrity of their current and future titles.
2. Legally and technically, it is far easier for them to simply "flip the switch" and let the server go down before the July 27th deadline. Rather than risking new EU laws forcing them to support a permanent competitor to eFootball indefinitely. With the unknown consequences of that from community development in the future. It will create pressure on them to keep their pricing on eFootball loot boxes or whatever they have now reasonable as people will just switch to PES 2021 if things get crazy.

I have emailed Konami asking for a formal response on this, so they are aware that the community is following this. I also asked my friends to send emails to Konami business and server development employees that we could find on LinkedIn to try and push this along.




2. If 90% of the community play PES6, but 60% of modders like to work on PES 2021 because of its nicer graphics. Is there enough people in the PES 2021 community to create a backlash to deter Konami from doing this?


Some interesting questions arise from this. What are the consequences if the game is killed ? The community is currently playing mostly PES 2021 and PES6. Pretty much everyone in the world who is involved with PES 2021 posts here in one forum section on Evo-Web. While the PES6 community is spread out across the internet.

Between
- the pes6.es Telegram (1,000+ members) generating content,
- the 5,000+ matches played each day on the games two popular online servers ,
- the endless Facebook patch groups and master league communities.... especially with massive growth in South America and the Middle East recently
- the Pesretro (and soon Pesbot AI) communities.....

With PES6 being the phenomenom it is, would the PES community survive with PES6 powering it on it's own?

What do you personally plan to do if PES 2021 is turned off? Lets be honest - are we building something sustainable for the future or just making content for a game that could disappear tomorrow? Years worth of time just.... lost ?

It seems like PES 2021 is more popular than PES6 because it has more content here on Evo-Web and most of the technical discussion happens in this section. But there’s also a large group of PES6 developers active on their own channels (reverse engineers, programmers) and a lot of content and activity for that game happens across the wider internet… almost like what happened with other legendary titles like Super Mario 64.

I'd estimate 5% of pes players play PES 2021, 5% play other titles like 2013/2016/2017 and 90% of pes players in the world today play PES6.
While we have this situation where almost all modders are naturally attracted to the game with the most advanced graphics for them to work with. So the game looks much more popular than it actually is. Like a high end car dealership (with beautiful cars) that has almost no customers inside. All the staff (modders) are busy cleaning the cars even if nobody is buying them.

So would there even be enough of a backlash to deter Konami from just turning off the denuvo servers? If its just mostly modders interested in the game ?

Is there anything we can do to influence them to stop them doing this?

A lot of interesting questions to ponder.

Either way, we'll have a better idea about the game's future after July 27th.

 

[WinnElevenpess]

My comment is purely based on guesswork. It won't be shut down, relax.

 

[Prankster]

My comment is purely based on guesswork. It won't be shut down, relax.

It's fair to say this is speculation, but it's not unrealistic either.

If the EU ruling changes obligations around online services or data handling, Konami could easily use it as justification to retire PES 2021 servers, especially given their potential long term negative effect on eFootball.

We'll likely have a clearer picture after July 27. Modders like Crabshank already retired from PES 2021 stating the game has no future.

 

[aristodemus]

Interesting topic. We still have FL26 in case PES2021 gets shut down, but I don't think that will happen for a while yet. Simply because €6000/month is almost certainly a drop in the ocean in terms of cost to profit for Konami, especially with the era of their eFootball monetization, and other income sources.
Also the ruling isn't supposed to be applied retroactively, so if Konami use it as an excuse to use the "flip switch", it will be a pretty lame one at that, but as you said, we'll see after the 27th of July.

That said, they may still be paying and using the authentication server for some slightly older titles, maybe even up to PES2018 (don't quote me on that, not sure if it even has Denuvo or just a standard Steam DRM). So they may just decide to cut costs on all old titles.

 

[Prankster]

Interesting topic. We still have FL26 in case PES2021 gets shut down, but I don't think that will happen for a while yet. Simply because €6000/month is almost certainly a drop in the ocean in terms of cost to profit for Konami, especially with the era of their eFootball monetization, and other income sources.
Also the ruling isn't supposed to be applied retroactively, so if Konami use it as an excuse to use the "flip switch", it will be a pretty lame one at that, but as you said, we'll see after the 27th of July.

That said, they may still be paying and using the authentication server for some slightly older titles, maybe even up to PES2018 (don't quote me on that, not sure if it even has Denuvo or just a standard Steam DRM). So they may just decide to cut costs on all old titles.

FL26 could be the reason for them to flip the switch. They won't want standalone games like that using the PES 2021 engine and competing with eFootball indefinitely. That would be extremely risky , as it's not possible to know how popular those mods will grow. If you look into how the legislation will actually work and the ramifications of not shutting the denuvo servers (to kill mods like FL26) before the ruling then it would be pretty incompetent of Konami not to take action now.

I believe we'll need to go back as far as PES 2016 if Konami switch off the denuvo servers. At that point the 5% of the community still playing PES 2021 will likely join the other 90% of the community who are playing PES6 (or just switch to a modernish Fifa game) I think. It'll be interesting to see how the community adapts.

 

[aristodemus]

FL26 could be the reason for them to flip the switch. They won't want standalone games like that using the PES 2021 engine and competing with eFootball indefinitely. That would be extremely risky , as it's not possible to know how popular those mods will grow. If you look into how the legislation will actually work and the ramifications of not shutting the denuvo servers (to kill mods like FL26) before the ruling then it would be pretty incompetent of Konami not to take action now.

I believe we'll need to go back as far as PES 2016 if Konami switch off the denuvo servers. At that point the 5% of the community still playing PES 2021 will likely join the other 90% of the community who are playing PES6 (or just switch to a modernish Fifa game) I think. It'll be interesting to see how the community adapts.

I'm not sure if I follow you correctly, but FL26 wouldn't be killed if they shut down Denuvo, as it is based on the cracked CPY version if I remember correctly. It's not just an applied patch mod in the traditional sense. So I think if PES2021 does get shut down, that 5% will move over to FL. At this point I actually think there is a larger percentage of users in the "PES 2021" category using FL26 than the actual Steam PES2021 itself. Plus I think it is a slightly larger demographic for PES2021, maybe up to 20% even or more. But I'm not that well versed with PES6 to know how many users actually play it, so you may be correct.

 

[Prankster]

I'm not sure if I follow you correctly, but FL26 wouldn't be killed if they shut down Denuvo, as it is based on the cracked CPY version if I remember correctly. It's not just an applied patch mod in the traditional sense. So I think if PES2021 does get shut down, that 5% will move over to FL. At this point I actually think there is a larger percentage of users in the "PES 2021" category using FL26 than the actual Steam PES2021 itself. Plus I think it is a slightly larger demographic for PES2021, maybe up to 20% even or more. But I'm not that well versed with PES6 to know how many users actually play it, so you may be correct.

A lot of people here do not realise the cracked CPY version still has Denuvo embedded inside it. The game is cracked and playable but Konami's kill switch is extremely difficult to remove and nobodies been able to do it. They still have the option to disable all FL26/CPY builds remotely whenever they please. People here after spending years working on mods and patches will click the exe file one day and nothing will happen.

About the demographics, a lot of people are interested in modding pes 2021 and they are all here in one place but the sheer scale of the PES6 community outside of evoweb makes it easily 10x+ more played than pes 2021. Disregarding the two servers, the discords, the telegram groups, there are even just pes6 patch groups on Facebook that have more followers/likes/comments than the largest threads here in the pes 2021 section on evoweb.

 

[daemonkf]

A lot of people here do not realise the cracked CPY version still has Denuvo embedded inside it. The game is cracked and playable but Konami's kill switch is extremely difficult to remove and nobodies been able to do it. They still have the option to disable all FL26/CPY builds remotely whenever they please. People here after spending years working on mods and patches will click the exe file one day and nothing will happen.

About the demographics, a lot of people are interested in modding pes 2021 and they are all here in one place but the sheer scale of the PES6 community outside of evoweb makes it easily 10x+ more played than pes 2021. Disregarding the two servers, the discords, the telegram groups, there are even just pes6 patch groups on Facebook that have more followers/likes/comments than the largest threads here in the pes 2021 section on evoweb.

You can launch a FL or CPY .exe without being connected to the internet which means it doesn't rely on anything remote.
Besides, if Konami wanted FL dead they would've killed or sued it into the ground 4 years ago.

 

[Dragovic]

You can launch a FL or CPY .exe without being connected to the internet which means it doesn't rely on anything remote.
Besides, if Konami wanted FL dead they would've killed or sued it into the ground 4 years ago.

My intent of comment is not for attacking you OP but I guess you're thinking too much. This comment above explains and concludes pretty much the whole question of the thread.

Denuvo is an anti-tamper software protection layer that is used to prevent or delay unauthorized copying and modification of games. The heartbeat servers you're talking about is to check if the game has been tampered or not. Once it has been cracked with a working crack, even Denuvo can't do anything about it from the server side. It cannot remotely “disable” a game that’s already cracked. FL being an example here. Once a working crack exists, server-side checks are irrelevant.

The 'Stop Killing Games' movement is mostly for the games which are closed and abandoned from publisher's end leading to no access to it even if the user has paid for that game. So the whole movement is about ownership of games and it's maintenance. And specifically those games which NEEDS INTERNET to start, like how Crew 1 was. Another always online game in that field would be NFS 2015. PES 2021 or any PES versions don't work like that. That 'flip the switch' thing is not real and just a myth. Especially for offline games. Publishers can’t magically brick offline-capable games unless the game was designed to be always-online from day one, like Crew or NFS 2015.

PES 2021 servers were closed in 2023 if I remember correctly but you can still play it offline and Denuvo can't do anything about it. Denuvo cannot remove anything. Only thing Denuvo does is to make the game difficult to play modified, cracked, or unauthorized copies, which often forcing users to rely on official, authorized versions.

So with that knowledge, I don't know why are we even thinking about it. Just chill

 

[Prankster]

You can launch a FL or CPY .exe without being connected to the internet which means it doesn't rely on anything remote.
Besides, if Konami wanted FL dead they would've killed or sued it into the ground 4 years ago.

No guys unfortunately even the FL and CPY crack still have the Denuvo code embedded in the .exe.. Denuvo issues a token to your PC that lets you play offline for awhile. That token has a hidden expiration date. Every few weeks and immediately after any Windows updates or hardware changes the game has to refresh that token or it will lock you out.

Nobody has actually removed Denuvo from the PES 2021 .exe .. even the CPY crack. You can verify this yourself with google.

Its highly likely Konami or Denuvo will switch those authentication servers off soon. With the EU Stop Killing Games laws likely to be accepted in July ... they have a massive incentive to kill the servers now rather than be legally forced to release a patch that strips out Denuvo. They won't risk exposing Denuvos secrets to hackers just to save an old game. Theres a very real chance PES 2021 becomes unplayable in the next 3 months.

 

[daemonkf]

No guys unfortunately even the FL and CPY crack still have the Denuvo code embedded in the .exe.. Denuvo issues a token to your PC that lets you play offline for awhile. That token has a hidden expiration date. Every few weeks and immediately after any Windows updates or hardware changes the game has to refresh that token or it will lock you out.

Nobody has actually removed Denuvo from the PES 2021 .exe .. even the CPY crack. You can verify this yourself with google.

Its highly likely Konami or Denuvo will switch those authentication servers off soon. With the EU Stop Killing Games laws likely to be accepted in July ... they have a massive incentive to kill the servers now rather than be legally forced to release a patch that strips out Denuvo. They won't risk exposing Denuvos secrets to hackers just to save an old game. Theres a very real chance PES 2021 becomes unplayable in the next 3 months.

That might be true for bypasses that indeed trick Denuvo into thinking that a token is validated.

But the CPY version of PES 21 is a full crack that removes that system entirely, not just bypasses it. There's no ticking timer on it that would trigger a refresh or something.

Therefore, even if we lose access to our steam version of the game (which sucks), the situation is not the same as it was with The Crew 1 two years ago.
The cracks will still work just like older games.

You can verify this by turning your internet connection completely off, install FL 26 and run it without turning your connection back on. The game will run just fine because it doesn't need a token anymore.

 

[Dragovic]

Should I be very frank here? If even remotely that was the case, we would be listening about it all over Reddit or some other media, not just from one guy on Evoweb. And especially, only PES 2021 won't be on the radar; there are lots of other games and better games to save if really that was the case.

While the PES6 community is spread out across the internet

5% play other titles like 2013/2016/2017 and 90% of pes players in the world today play PES6

I didn't want to comment earlier about this, but now I feel you just have a very strong bias for PES 6. Not that it is a bad thing, but the way you raised your point, saying 'most of the community plays PES 2021 or PES 6', or 'PES 6 community spread across the internet', then you haven't seen the PES 2013, 2017, and PES 2021 Facebook pages by the Brazilian and Southeast Asian community. You didn't even consider PES 2013, which has more content mods and more players than PES 2021, and it is from the Pre-Denuvo era, and went straight to PES 6. And saying PES 2013 having 5% player base shared with 16 and 17 is an insult, honestly.

Also, any specific reason you made a discussion thread on an editing forum? I believe this belongs to either the 'eFootball PES 2021 Discussion Thread (PC)' thread or the general Pro Evolution Soccer section.

 

[MrFootball]

It make me so Angry since years i have always a Bad feeling about that because there is something Konami Never wanted that we mod This Game and have Fun….

 

[israelonics]

I just checked now, and it says FL26 is completely DRM-free, so Denuvo has no impact on FL because it does not use steam, not connected to Konami server and has no anti-tamper DRM

 

[Prankster]

Should I be very frank here? If even remotely that was the case, we would be listening about it all over Reddit or some other media, not just from one guy on Evoweb. And especially, only PES 2021 won't be on the radar; there are lots of other games and better games to save if really that was the case.



I didn't want to comment earlier about this, but now I feel you just have a very strong bias for PES 6. Not that it is a bad thing, but the way you raised your point, saying 'most of the community plays PES 2021 or PES 6', or 'PES 6 community spread across the internet', then you haven't seen the PES 2013, 2017, and PES 2021 Facebook pages by the Brazilian and Southeast Asian community. You didn't even consider PES 2013, which has more content mods and more players than PES 2021, and it is from the Pre-Denuvo era, and went straight to PES 6. And saying PES 2013 having 5% player base shared with 16 and 17 is an insult, honestly.

Also, any specific reason you made a discussion thread on an editing forum? I believe this belongs to either the 'eFootball PES 2021 Discussion Thread (PC)' thread or the general Pro Evolution Soccer section.

Oh no don't worry about that. I play the 2006 downgrade patch (built on PES 2021) almost every day. So im concerned about that. I also really like the PES 2013 patches too, I know that scene is still very active however90% of the pes community play PES6. There are over 5000 matches played every day on the pes6 online servers and all the other things I mentioned.

Ive been told the CPY crack had enough checks nerfed in 2020 to get the game up and running without it crashing but there are still thousands of encrypted integrity checks buried in the exe. You can think of them as "Sleeper Cells" that will trigger under certain timing conditions and runtime states in the future and these will eventually kill the game if the denuvo servers go offline and things expire.

Either way, we'll see how things go by July 27th.

 

[MJI]

Oh no don't worry about that. I play the 2006 downgrade patch (built on PES 2021) almost every day. So im concerned about that. I also really like the PES 2013 patches too, I know that scene is still very active however90% of the pes community play PES6. There are over 5000 matches played every day on the pes6 online servers and all the other things I mentioned.

Ive been told the CPY crack had enough checks nerfed in 2020 to get the game up and running without it crashing but there are still thousands of encrypted integrity checks buried in the exe. You can think of them as "Sleeper Cells" that will trigger under certain timing conditions and runtime states in the future and these will eventually kill the game if the denuvo servers go offline and things expire.

Either way, we'll see how things go by July 27th.

Where you got information that "90% of the pes community play PES6"? U said that there are "5000 matches played every day on the pes6 online servers", I think 99% of PES 2021 community is playing offline (maybe online matches via parsec), on Steam there is 1100 people playing PES 2021 everyday and we can't count CPY/cracked and SP Football Life players, i don't get your point with comparing PES 6 where its PES 2021 topic.

 

[Roger Machado]

Where you got information that "90% of the pes community play PES6"? U said that there are "5000 matches played every day on the pes6 online servers", I think 99% of PES 2021 community is playing offline (maybe online matches via parsec), on Steam there is 1100 people playing PES 2021 everyday and we can't count CPY/cracked and SP Football Life players, i don't get your point with comparing PES 6 where its PES 2021 topic.

of course its just an impression but pes 6 community here in brazil its HUGE

i would say more ppl play pes 6 than 2021 and efootball combined

 

[Prankster]

Where you got information that "90% of the pes community play PES6"? U said that there are "5000 matches played every day on the pes6 online servers", I think 99% of PES 2021 community is playing offline (maybe online matches via parsec), on Steam there is 1100 people playing PES 2021 everyday and we can't count CPY/cracked and SP Football Life players, i don't get your point with comparing PES 6 where its PES 2021 topic.

Personally, I think 90% of the PES community is still playing PES 6, and it’s hard to ignore the evidence. The PES 6 Infinity Patch alone - which nobody even plays online, since online always uses the default database - has around 32,000 followers on Facebook. And that’s just one PES 6 patch group. There are too many to list, and many of them have tens of thousands of followers, all centered around offline content.

There are also more than 100 total conversion patches for PES 6 on EvoWeb, like the Dreamfinder patches, and people there clearly lean toward offline play as well.

PES 6 probably even has more online players than PES 2021 has offline players - so that gives you an idea of how big the offline player base for PES 6 must be. It’s huge.

I think modders on EvoWeb tend to choose the game with the best graphics to get the most out of their work, which is why many focus on PES 2021.

Even so, PES 2021 only has maybe 2-3x more content there compared to PES 6, and pretty much everyone in the world working on PES 2021 is concentrated in that section of EvoWeb.

Meanwhile, PES 6 has massive Facebook patching groups, online server infrastructure with around 1 million registered accounts, a 5,000-member Discord, and even a 1,000-member Spanish-run European Telegram community that’s active daily with memes and discussion.

It even has patches still being physically printed and distributed on discs in South American and Arab countries by younger fans in large quantities, along with sites like PES Retro keeping everything going.

 

[FCDallas_Fan]

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers, but they don't align with anything I've seen from my time working in the game industry. After the first year, the price of maintaining Denuvo's periodic checks rarely exceeded $2k (USD) per month. And for a very large game developer/publisher I worked for, Denuvo was bundled with every release and we paid a yearly fee that covered every game. I'd be willing to bet Konami is on a similar plan and this yearly fee is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

With that said, I wouldn't expect losing the ability to pay PES 21 unless Konami moves away the Denuvo solution completely. I don't see that happening since many (maybe all?) of their games being released in 2026 still have the layer.

 

[bochen00]

Main topic aside - why throw in percentages about which game is most played when you have no access to actual numbers?
That's not analysis, it's just personal bias dressed up as data, which ironically undermines the credibility of your main point.

PES 6, PES 13, PES 17 and PES 21 are among the most actively modded games in the series - that much we can verify. But nobody actually knows which one has the most players on PCs, handhelds and consoles.
PES 5, PES 12 or PES 18 could be more popular than anyone thinks. Unlikely maybe given mods availability spreads, but possible.
The data simply doesn't exist.

 

[Godmode_ON]

I can't speak on whether the CPY version has actually fully bypassed the Denuvo offline check, but I can tell you for a fact you can simply replace the Steam exe with the CPY one and the game will work just fine, so the Steam integration will keep working just fine as long as the CPY version has actually fully disabled Denuvo.

 

[Ramon_roman11]

Personally, I think 90% of the PES community is still playing PES 6, and it’s hard to ignore the evidence. The PES 6 Infinity Patch alone - which nobody even plays online, since online always uses the default database

Mate, there are patches that let you play online with edited database and infinitty it's one of them.

 

[MJI]

Personally, I think 90% of the PES community is still playing PES 6, and it’s hard to ignore the evidence. The PES 6 Infinity Patch alone - which nobody even plays online, since online always uses the default database - has around 32,000 followers on Facebook. And that’s just one PES 6 patch group. There are too many to list, and many of them have tens of thousands of followers, all centered around offline content.

There are also more than 100 total conversion patches for PES 6 on EvoWeb, like the Dreamfinder patches, and people there clearly lean toward offline play as well.

PES 6 probably even has more online players than PES 2021 has offline players - so that gives you an idea of how big the offline player base for PES 6 must be. It’s huge.

I think modders on EvoWeb tend to choose the game with the best graphics to get the most out of their work, which is why many focus on PES 2021.

Even so, PES 2021 only has maybe 2-3x more content there compared to PES 6, and pretty much everyone in the world working on PES 2021 is concentrated in that section of EvoWeb.

Meanwhile, PES 6 has massive Facebook patching groups, online server infrastructure with around 1 million registered accounts, a 5,000-member Discord, and even a 1,000-member Spanish-run European Telegram community that’s active daily with memes and discussion.

It even has patches still being physically printed and distributed on discs in South American and Arab countries by younger fans in large quantities, along with sites like PES Retro keeping everything going.

I really don't get it why you keep mentioning PES 6, its PES 2021 Denuvo topic in editing forum (where it shouldn't be there tbh), It feels like you wanna convince us by force that PES 6 is the best game, for me personally PES 2021 is a better game than PES 6. Thanks to things like stadiums, turfs, cameras etc. you can make it look like a real TV Broadcast match, I really enjoying that simulation thing, you can't get that much level of detail in PES 6, for me PES 6 looks kinda arcade. In this section people are working really hard there, it's much harder to make a full patch of PES 2021 than make a full patch of PES 6. I need to praise that community, everyday we get new things/mods.

 

[Dragovic]

I really don't get it why you keep mentioning PES 6, its PES 2021 Denuvo topic in editing forum (where it shouldn't be there tbh)

My biggest gripe in this whole discussion is that I did try to add my two cents about Denuvo earlier, even though I mostly dismissed the idea itself. Maybe if we had stuck closer to the actual topic, it would have helped educate more people, including me.

What really bothered me, though, was bringing in random, unverified claims, like saying “90% of the community plays PES 6 online,” while completely dismissing offline players of other PES titles, is a bias. In a PES 2021 focused discussion, this comes across less like sharing perspective and more like trying to convince people to move to PES 6. It feels similar to going to another country and constantly praising your own while ignoring the context, preferences, and strengths of where you already are, without acknowledging the flaws of your own country either.

But anyway, my position on Denuvo is that it cannot do anything to an offline game.

 

[Prankster]

Mate, there are patches that let you play online with edited database and infinitty it's one of them.

We can estimate that all PES 2021 offline content combined is around the size of just one PES6 patching group (that’s how large and established the PES6 community is outside evoweb)

So it raises the question would there be enough public backlash to stop Konami shutting down PES 2021?

The PES6 patching group Infinity has 33,000 members on Facebook for example and Football Life 2026 has 24,000 members. I don't think there would be public backlash if pes6 infinity was shut down

That video you posted of the server is a bit of a misrepresentation in that regard. Its an old video of the pes6.es server (I actually did the reverse engineering work for those emojis in that video! ) when most of the community was playing their games on PES6Stars. If you check the PES6.es statistics screenshot below from that same server you posted the video of, you’ll see that almost 100% of the online matches in the PES6 community are played using no patch

Its important to clarify the Facebook patch groups of pes6 are primarily enjoyed offline.
People don't download those patches like Infinity for online play. 99.9% of matches played online they dont use a patch.
So a comparison between Infinity and Football Life is valid ... they're like for like.

 

[Aoba]

CPY is probably just fine. Either way, voices38 would probably destroy it entirely... sooner or later.

 

[Prankster]

I really don't get it why you keep mentioning PES 6, its PES 2021 Denuvo topic in editing forum (where it shouldn't be there tbh), It feels like you wanna convince us by force that PES 6 is the best game, for me personally PES 2021 is a better game than PES 6. Thanks to things like stadiums, turfs, cameras etc. you can make it look like a real TV Broadcast match, I really enjoying that simulation thing, you can't get that much level of detail in PES 6, for me PES 6 looks kinda arcade. In this section people are working really hard there, it's much harder to make a full patch of PES 2021 than make a full patch of PES 6. I need to praise that community, everyday we get new things/mods.

"PES 6 looks kinda arcade"

I'll try to briefly explain why people prefer this without dragging the thread off topic: A lot of animations in pes 2021 are just for show (player models running with their hands moving in a flamboyant drama-queen fashion would be the most obvious thing to mention here) and PES 2021 leans more toward animation-driven gameplay in general faking simulation with scripting. Its like a Hollywood movie instead of a videogame. PES6's bare-metal control is more fun for users because PES6's 8-directional arcade movement / limited input set is exactly what allows for precise control and consistent movesets in a 3d environment. This is like a 3D Tekken or Street Fighter game. A proper videogame. It gives you more direct control. PES6 has these Arcade sort of constraints as part of its excellent design philosophy.

I only bring up PES6 because of two questions: if PES 2021's offline content is only about as popular as one PES6 Facebook patch group (Football Life has 24K followers on Facebook, PES6 Infinity has 32K followers on Facebook) - would there be enough backlash to stop Konami from bricking PES 2021? And second, would the PES community survive if it were carried by PES6 alone? These are interesting questions considering the Denuvo problem PES 2021 has brought to the community.

I think some modders here on evoweb are in an echo chamber, they create graphics mods and they are invested in the graphics that PES 2021 has.
Peek outside evoweb and most people choose to play pes6 not pes 2021 (90% of the community) and its because they don't like the gameplay or design philosophy of PES 2021. They prefer the arcade design philosophy of PES6.

 

[badgerbadger]

I think the entire game wouldn't be disabled forever.

Take-Two Interactive releases 2K games every year. I have NBA 2K19 on my Steam Library. I can install the game anytime I want because I bought it back in early 2019. However, a year later 2K made it unavailable. Which means you can't buy this game anymore. You need to go through second hand game shops on Internet (similar to how you had to get FIFA 16 for a very long time). But if you purchased 2K19, it is in your library and it is still available.



I hope this is the case for Konami's PES 2021 there because the moment they decide to kill a game entirely, this will probably backfire because it won't be the only release that would be killed. They can't do this, it will be a big, big customer loss. Reason is;

Now you could tell me that people would be coerced to move onto consoles. Few years ago, that would make sense but with recent developments in the world, console prices are going up. There is an attack on working class right now, all over the world, that is intended to steal every penny of theirs through inflation, made up wars, tariffs and laws that support billionaires. Basically grocery prices are increasing a lot which means people have less money for their hobbies and a lot of PC users, might just not afford to get a console right now.

Konami would be happy to pay Denuvo server costs in this case.

 

[Dragovic]

The PES6 patching group Infinity has 33,000 members on Facebook while Football Life 2026 has 24,000 members

Mate, you just compared a Patch Fan Group (written in the title of the page) with a patch page.

If you're comparing PES pages, regardless if patch or not, I can also show you the following PES 2021 PC related page, which is just of a country with 50k members.


But since your logic is based on comparison of pages, then that means 90% community is playing eFootball mobile, and that doesn't add up with PES 6 or PES 2021 player base combined right? And we haven't even compared FIFA yet.


I understand the point you're trying to make, but compare things that are comparable. On that note, the PES 2017 forum or community should also be the same or better than 2021, in my opinion. Considering not everyone has a good enough PC to run 2021, many players enjoy 2017. And PES 2017, gameplay-wise, is better overall than both 6 and 2021, and has Denuvo. Why not raise this same concern there as well?

 

[cockneyroma]

be relaxed....pes 2021 cpy or football life dont have any kill switch,,,dont panicking without a reason.