This past fall there was a lot of soccer news all at once. FIFA 22 was releasing in a then solid state, eFootball was struggling after a poor trailer and an even worse demo. Beyond those mainstays, smaller developers like UFL seemed to jump at the opportunity to capitalize on eFootball‘s misfortunes. While the UFL looks to be legitimate, other games like Football Player 2023 seem like one big hoax. In short, there was a lot to keep track of these past couple months, which leads us to another new video game called GOALS.
What We Know About GOALS
hello, world pic.twitter.com/Bwxc2AMvES
— GOALS (@PlayGOALS) July 22, 2021
Now at the time of this announcement, there just wasn’t enough information to warrant anything other than a “wait and see” approach. Well, since then more information has been released and GOALS is starting to take shape.
Goals Game Inc.
From the mouth of founder and CEO Andreas, GOALS is:
GOALS is a AAA football game. Free to play, cross-play, multiplayer first and esports ready. It will use a play to earn model where time spent and skill in the game will be rewarded through digital assets (NFTs) so more people hopefully can make a living playing the game.
Free to play you say? Well, that sounds a little like Konami’s eFootball 2022 so Andreas will have hopefully taken notes on how disastrous that game was at launch (and still is to be honest). On why the “free” purchase price is important:
Free to play opens up the football genre to more gamers and cross play allows friends to play no matter their platform of choice. We see no reason why the world’s largest sport shouldn’t be the world’s largest game.
Free to play also means that the game will have to rely on either microtransactions and/or advertising in order to pull a profit (or taking percentages from the NFT sales when users swap them with each other, but there’s a lot of unknowns with the NFT component for now). Crossplay, another Konami endeavor, suggests that the GOALS will be available on multiple devices, thus bringing folks together in an effort to achieve a large user base. “Multiplayer first” suggests that this will cater more to online play, which isn’t ideal for offline players:
Multiplayer first means we are going to put a lot of resources into creating a fluid experience online to eliminate lag, latency and button delay, which is a big problem in football games today. Basically taking a page out of the @playValorant textbook.
The “esports first” component hammers this point home.
Esports ready means we are not going to use catch-up mechanics/rubber band effects/”handicap” etc. The best gamers will win due to their skill and nothing else. We will put a lot of emphasis into a proper MMR system with tournaments and ladders.
Most games have some scripting in them, so it will be interesting to see if GOALS can remove it and become truly script-free where players earn their rewards through playing and skill. This sort of approach helped to attract contributors, one such is former pro-FIFA player Kurt Fenech who’s no stranger to controversy.
Beyond excited to announce that I'll be working alongside an absolute super team in the making of a new football game @goalsgame. The monopoly will be over, the suffering will be over and above all we'll finally get the game football fans deserve I promise you that
— Kurt (@Kurt0411Fifa) August 18, 2021
With Kurt and another popular FIFA Twitch streamer, Nick RTFM, GOALS is certainly utilizing the community that helped make FUT popular to help design and build a game catered towards the competitive crowd. It’s a logical approach as many players have grown tired of FIFA and its inconsistent gameplay mechanics. As GOALS attempts to differentiate itself from the current games available, GOALS co-founder and chief technology officer Goran Syberg Falguera offered his eight-part manifesto on what their vision would be. Besides the standard management speak, there are a few notable points.
Crossplay
“Furthermore, we are building a game for everyone so it needs to run on as low spec as possible.”
This quote speaks to the crossplay effort, which GOALS is prioritizing. Not even EA has been able to pull off crossplay for its FIFA franchise, so we’ll be watching to see if GOALS can actually pull this off. But it’s also worth noting that “it needs to run on as low spec as possible,” but that doesn’t mean mobile devices yet solely because the platforms to play this future game on haven’t been announced.
We just had our first cross platform playtest! With a dedicated server running in the cloud. Everything is very rough but it feels great to be on the way. Let's go!
— Göran Syberg Falguera (@GSybergFalguera) December 2, 2021
“On the flip side: if we can use established libraries or tools that we do not have to maintain, we can minimize the amount of tech we maintain. Also, there is no point in spending time reinventing the wheel. Knowing when to take a dependency is indeed one of the most difficult parts of software engineering. With this in mind, the guiding principle must be: If a tool or library exists, that was built to solve your particular problem, and the cost of purchase and maintenance is acceptable, it is ok to take a dependency.”
Building a video game from the ground up that can challenge established games such as FIFA & eFootball is a monumental task in both scale and investment. Leveraging pre-existing assets such as the Unreal Engine and its open-sourced library could be beneficial. The GOALS team has not announced what engine or software it will be using, but it wouldn’t be surprising if we see them follow in the footsteps of eFootball and UFL with the utilization of the Unreal Engine.
Community Feedback
As we have seen with both FIFA and eFootball, the thoughts and feedback provided by the community can really help to shape a game before and after release. GOALS, through its official Twitter account and Discord server, has consistently pinged the community for feedback since its release announcement.
This Friday we want to know your opinion on how PRESSING should work. In a football video game, it’s impossible for a single user to control all 11 players on the pitch at the same time – the user is going to require some form of assistance for efficient pressing. 1/6
— GOALS (@PlayGOALS) November 12, 2021
Come join our Discord and discuss heading in GOALS with the community. https://t.co/dVMaajyjKs pic.twitter.com/T2pZUACWbc
— GOALS (@PlayGOALS) October 8, 2021
You can see the heavy influence FIFA has had on the GOALS team. Pressing, which caused EA to completely revamp their defensive approach, is something GOALS looks to tackle with help from the community. Certain controversial core gameplay elements could definitely benefit from a fresh approach, as could the gameplay in general with years of old code and legacy issues plaguing FIFA and eFootball.
Play To Earn
“Pay to Play” has been a common criticism thrown at competitive games such as FIFA. Games that favor microtransactions and loot boxes as a way to quickly progress in a game divide the community, pushing out a lot of players who don’t want to take shortcuts and earn what they deserve. In their recently updated website, GOALS states that:
At GOALS, we do not want to develop a complex economic structure with an abundance of different tokens, only to have the game as a little side function to bring some utility. In my humble opinion, this has been one of the major shortcomings for a lot of the early blockchain games. Many of them are truly play-TO-earn, where playing is a necessity to earn rather than a joyful experience. On the contrary, we want to put the gameplay experience in the center to appeal to the general gaming crowd. This would not only give an opportunity to earn, but the experience of doing so would at the same time be very enjoyable – play-AND-earn.
Blockchains, NFTs, and crypto — all of the popular buzzwords from the past two years in one paragraph certainly raises some eyebrows (couldn’t sneak in Web3 to wrap them all together though, for shame). While I won’t go down the rabbit hole that is NFTs, the emphasis on creating some sort of market where you do indeed own the assets sounds like a slippery slope to go down. However, it’s perhaps profitable if you logically conclude that GOALS will take its cut.
Of course, the game itself will have to be good enough to attract and keep players, but creating a game where this type of environment could exist also means there’s a potential to bring out the worst in human behavior. Either way, this approach appears to be something that GOALS wants to do.
At GOALS, we take the opposite approach and instead acknowledge our users’ right and demand for a secondary market. With the rise of web3, we believe the timing is right and technology mature enough to create a game where we promote P2P trading of in-game assets. Through the use of blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFT), every asset will be fully owned by the player, and not by us. GOALS is a free-to-play game, and our revenue will instead come from transaction royalties on secondary sales.
Well, there it is The optimist will see this as motivation to make a good game in thinking that a good game will attract more players, which will build the secondary market in which GOALS can profit. On the other side, the pessimist will see that this could be a game where people invest time into it with no long-term commitment from the developer, which makes it a potentially dangerous cash grab. Both sides can plant those flags for now because only time will decide a winner.
Bottom Line
There’s a lot we don’t know about GOALS at this point. Important questions like a release date, which platforms will this be released on, and more are still lingering. What we do know is that GOALS is rapidly expanding, filling out their staff while giving us a clear idea as to what kind of game they envision this will be. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that we won’t see this game in 2022. Regardless, if history has taught us anything, it’s that more competition is never a bad thing and GOALS seems to be a legitimate footy title that we’ll eventually get our hands on sometime in the future.
What are your thoughts surrounding GOALS?
