Dying a slow death. Sports is all about the stories, the personalities, the names, the drama, the tribalism. If you can't license the big teams or big competiti

Dying a slow death. Sports is all about the stories, the personalities, the names, the drama, the tribalism. If you can't license the big teams or big competitions and have to rename everything (which PES is famous for) you just can't compete with the same feeling. And game quality wise they don't stand out anymore like they did for a few years to compensate. I used to play sports games 90% singleplayer or with friends in the same room. The fact you had PES and your friend had FIFA didn't matter much, even if one game sells 20% and the other 80% of marketshare, they can co-exist because when you play together, it's on one machine, the controls are just slightly different but they have quicksettings for those. Now that it's all gone online, network effects take over. If you want to multiplayer you both need the same game, and the dominant market share game will thrive while the rest basically offers singleplayer only + multiplayer mostly against a small community of mostly strangers. That's also partly why PES hasn't been doing very well the past few games I think.