For aeons untold the battle was the same every year - FIFA versus PES, the two biggest football games each attracting its own loyal fans.

This year, though, things are changing for good. After taking a year off releasing Pro Evolution Soccer, Konami has just announced a huge change for the series.

It's being renamed eFootball, for one thing, and it's going to release as a completely free-to-play title when it comes out this Autumn.

It's initially going to release on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC, but there will also be full versions for iOS and Android down the line - although whether it'll come to Switch is less clear.

Konami eventually hopes for every platform to be able to play each other fairly, too, although as the roadmap laid out below shows it may be a little while before that's actually practical. That timeline also raises the interesting question of what teams will actually be playable in the game beyond the initial roster laid out - something we'll likely learn more about soon.

Konami renames PES as eFootball, and will go completely free to play photo 2
Konami

For now we don't have a release date to look forward to, but "Early Autumn" doesn't sound too far off. Hopefully we'll get our hands on the game soon enough, to measure up how much of a threat it's going to be to the increasingly dominant rule of FIFA.

You can find out more about some of the gameplay improvements that Konami's working on by visiting the game's official website, which is up and running, but the change to a freemium model is the biggest change coming down the pike.