“It’s definitely different from the competition” – Free-to-play UFL is coming for EA FC’s crown

YOU get the feeling that Strikerz Inc. CEO Eugene Nashilov saw something no one else did.

That’s the only way to explain why he’s sitting in his studio in Cyprus building a game to take on the mighty EA Sports FC.

3

Considering Strikerz Inc. started with four people in 2018 and now has about 320 in 2024, he’s not the only one who believes in the UFL.

The free-to-play football game will launch in September on PS5 and Xbox Series X | If, as Nashilov told me, he is coming for the EA FC crown.

GLHF: In which areas did you want to innovate?

Eugene Nashilov: When we were deciding how we wanted to enter this competition, we understood that going this classic route, taking pretty much the same approach to game modes… wouldn’t work.

Once we understood that that wasn’t going to work, then we had the idea that we needed to restructure the game so that it played and felt differently, and that’s how we came up with the idea that we want our fantasy.

Basically, we create clubs and make deals with players to play for those clubs.

In a way, it’s like a fantasy, so we wanted to become the centerpiece of the product, so you can download the game easily without any barriers.

Therefore, it is free to play. You will not need to have a PSN or Xbox subscription. You do not need these subscriptions to play UFL.

But if you have these subscriptions, we will provide some additional content and stuff for you to enjoy the game, but it has to be super accessible, and those are the two main ideas.

They basically took everything else away.

It’s definitely different from the competitors, so if you talk about the core part of the game, I would say that we’re trying to deliver an experience that is, first and foremost, fun… but you have to keep in mind that basically what we’re doing is trying to put 90 minutes of a real football match into eight minutes of a digital football match and therefore all speeds, all actions need time.

You need to receive a ball in real life and spend a few seconds to do it.

But if you have a few seconds to receive the ball in a game, you will be stuck in a situation where you can’t do anything with your gamepad.

You are just waiting for the animation to start, and this makes the game unresponsive and therefore you simply cannot opt ​​exclusively for simulation.

Is it more realistic than PES?

I think they had a big community that loved Master League and stuff, and you know, it was a good game.

The problem is that it wasn’t popular online, and that online aspect is actually the deciding factor nowadays, because people are used to playing together, whether on a team or among themselves.

And so their model, which was more or less realistic, took longer to do things.

If you combine this with the online experience where you have latency issues, you essentially scale the low responsiveness issue.

Also, they started with the idea that it would be cross-platform, like you had one guy playing on a console and another guy playing on mobile and they could play against each other.

That was the concept they went with when they were going into the open testing of eFootball, and that didn’t work out either, because to us it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to work, because when you’re playing on a console, you’re expected to pass some time there.

You’re sitting down, you have a TV, you want to spend some quality time, and when you’re playing on your phone, you might be traveling on the subway or wherever, and then you’re playing and then something happens and you have to give up.

What was the first football game you played and what is your favorite football game?

I remember playing the first versions of FIFA on PC.

Then they had this edition of the World Cup that came later with the 2002 World Cup, or the Millennium, where you had this arcade element where you could hold down the shoot button for a long time and you would have this fireball who, basically, will score from anywhere on the field.

UFL was originally planned to be released in 2022. Why was it delayed?

I think we hit several force majeure events throughout development.

So basically, we’ve been in development for almost eight years – eight years ago we were four people.

So it was me, Max, our CDO, my partner, one of our game designers, and one of our art directors.

So it was a very complicated process because we felt like we were building a car while we were trying to drive it… for the first five years we had to work under the radar, so we didn’t talk openly about what we were actually doing because we didn’t want the attention. from the media at that time, because what we felt was that we didn’t want to share our story before it felt solid.

Because if we said we were working on a football simulator designed to compete with EA and Konami, everyone would laugh at us.

And that’s okay because you know, it’s a very complicated task.

EA has over 1,000 people working on a title like this, and that was the process.

Then, back in the territories where we had a lot of people, the war started and we had to remove people and reorganize ourselves once again.

So there was a lot of administrative and organizational work that we had to remove people from and reorganize once again.

What is the extent of Ronaldo’s investment?

How much I cannot say. The truth is that we had a consortium of investors and the total amount invested was 40 million, and he is part of the consortium.

Does he advise on the game?

So of course we talk to him and his team regularly.

I can’t say we’re looking for advice on how to make a football game, because a simulator is always a simulator, it’s not real life.

And we had a series of problems throughout our production that were exactly this problem…

But in the general sense, the football vibe, the look of everything, the way the characters move and stuff, do they feel natural?

We try to ask him questions, his team – do the moves seem realistic to you? Do the tricks look realistic, do the transitions between them?

Would you say that you exchange messages with Ronaldo’s team weekly?

Weekly. Yes, emails, WhatsApp and sometimes calls.

We are in close contact because we have to do a lot of things that are related to the brand and so we do a lot of things on social media, and so we have a lot of contact with them, and how can we do a more interesting type of project, or how can we do some kind of story around what we’re doing and how Cristiano can be part of that story, how we can make both brands work.

What are some areas that you think need some work?

The first thing we are working on is smoothness, which is a very general notion, right, but it is still basically related to all the features and their transitions between them: locomotion, dribbling, ball reception, ball physics and collisions between players .

So all these things combined, they attribute to smoothness.

So we worked a lot on smoothness.

The second thing we work on is receiving the ball.

We’re working hard on this because sometimes players still miss the ball in situations where they shouldn’t… when you put your game online and there’s latency, that adds to the more problematic areas that you just multiplied, so you have to fix this.

The third thing would definitely be AI.

We’re working hard on the AI, both the attacking AI and the defensive AI, but with the defensive AI, we’re certainly fixing any issues related to the first beta.

I think it’s worth saying that we want to have a manual aspect to the feel.

I also think there’s a general responsiveness that we work on.

It’s much less about mechanics than it is about servers, networks and everything else.

And in relation to networking, we have a current model.

We are updating it in several ways and will continue further.

I’m not sure when that will happen, but we will be releasing a version two that will eliminate some of the waste related to timing and latency, making it even more responsive in the future.

It seems like there are a lot of things that need to be worked on. How confident are you that you’ll hit your next release date?

We are quite confident that we can do it.

Of course there will be some compromise, 100%, but you know that’s the thing with games, there’s always something you can do, and as I said, we have a ten year delay in working on features.

The point is to understand when the game is of adequate quality to be released, because we are a game-as-a-service business model, which basically means that we will update the game regularly.

This is not the same case as our competitors because they launch an annual product and although they update the game with content and other things, it is still an annual product, and at the end of the year they abandon it and launch a new one.

Operation and live operations are part of the story that we’re building and that we want to really engage the public with, because what we’re saying is, look, maybe this isn’t perfect, but we’re going to be working on this system.

What is the current size of the studio?

So there are approximately 320 people.

Therefore, 110 people working internally at UFL and approximately 100 more working with us as an outsourcing effort in all possible areas

How many people do you see working on this in the next year?

I think we will hire approximately 100 more over the course of a year of operation.

Where does the money come from?

Firstly, it’s all about customization, just like in Fortnite.

So you customize your players, their appearance, the uniform they play in, the stadium they play in and all that stuff.

Secondly, there are also toiletries. We will have lots of football boots, exclusive logos and exclusive kit designs. Some of them will be customized, basically designed by us. Some will be marked. We’re going to have a lot of brand integrations, and when you think about the biggest brands that we think of in terms of football items like cleats and balls and other things, we’re going to have that in the game.

The third part would be power-ups.

Basically, what power-ups do is speed up your progress, so you earn more money in each match and thus can reach better players faster. So that’s another thing, and in addition to that, we also have skins. I think this is an important thing.

For more on the game, check out a UFL preview we did last year.

3

All the latest Xbox reviews from The Sun

Get the scoop on more of the latest Xbox releases from our expert reviewers.

For PS5 and Nintendo Switch, check out our full game reviews section.