Re: Winning Eleven 10 - PS2 - Official Thread
Well, it makes a lot of sense having PES6 released before the WorldCup. Konami have had a lot of time to prepare this pre-WC release since there has not been any Final Evolution / International / Whatever winter relase of WE9. From the business point of view, EA have had major sucesses in the past with their event-oriented games, such as "Road to World Cup '98", "World Cup 2002" and the likes. It is absurd that Konami has failed to capitalize on this events before.
If I were SeaBass Tsakatsuka I would have thought: "Well, this is the last release we're getting out on PS2. We've currently pushed the hardware to its limits, there's little more that we can do now technically. So that only leaves space for a 'tweak-release' of WE10 - something like WE9 on steroids. We therefore can do two things, one is releasing the proverbial Final Evolution version in January, and wait until PES3 comes out to release WE10. The other thing we can do is skip the winter edition, take a little more time on the tweaking, licensing and the likes, and get both the Japanese and European versions of the new game released well before the summer: hence we'll be able to market it along the WorldCup boost and make A LOT of money".
I wonder what would prevent Konami from doing that. They've announced this version when it was almost finished, most probably they've been working on its conversion to PAL in the meanwhile.
Just my 2¢...