Sports gaming fans may have noticed that, as the World Cup dominates headlines and the popular consciousness worldwide, there is no (obvious) official video game to help fans play along at home.
EA Sports FC, formerly known as FIFA, used to be the home of such releases, first as standalone titles, then later as expansions to the base FIFA game. But after EA Sports' very public spat with football's world body a few years back, they lost that license, leaving EA Sports FC's millions of players across the globe unable to download an official version of the tournament. All they got instead this month was a bootleg update called "The World's Game".
Luke Plunkett
(To explain this to non-sports gamers, the official license for stuff like this is everything; fans want to be able to recreate what they're seeing on TV, so traditionally the official World Cup game has had the same shirts, trophy, stadiums and even broadcast graphics as the real thing).
If EA hasn't got the official license, maybe one-time-rivals Konami were able to pick it up instead? While the days of their Pro Evo series being a legitimate competitor for FIFA are long gone, the bones of that game live on in a platform called eFootball, which basically serves as a reminder of how good PES once was, and how despite being gutted and stripped for parts it still plays a better game of football than EA Sports FC.
But no, Konami doesn't have the license either. Like EA Sports FC, eFootball also has a knock-off version of the World Cup, and it's so shoddily-implemented that I'm not even going to bother to describe it to you. It's bad.
Maybe Goal, the new free-to-play arcade football game grabbing some headlines, has some kind of tie-in? Lol, no, I played that game for about ten minutes and hated every second spent with its bizarre and unnecessary tweaks to the most popular sport in the world's basic rules. It also has nothing to do with the World Cup and is exclusively built around online play with fake players and fake teams, so this paragraph is only really here to warn football fans not to play it, World Cup or no.
Luke Plunkett
If you want to play an official World Cup game in 2026, there is only one place you can get it all, and that's on...Netflix? As I wrote (with a huge amount of trepidation) a few months back, for reasons known only to the corrupt morons inside FIFA HQ, the rights to the single biggest sports event on the planet have been handed over to these guys:
A16z is Andreessen Horowitz, a terrible company even by venture capital's vampiric standards, run by some of the most overt technofascists operating in Silicon Valley today. Refactor's site boasts of hires from rights licensing company OneTeam (whose partners are currently under investigation by the FBI) and N3TWORK (a blockchain studio), and their single published sports game, Football Simulator, is not exactly a smash hit.
It should be little surprise, then, to find that the resulting game–FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition--is absolute dogshit. It's putrid. It's an embarrassment to anyone who plays it, to the device it's played on, to the people who made it, the people who lent their names to it and the medium of video games in general.
FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition is available for TVs and desktops. You need to sign into Netflix to play it, then connect 1-4 phones to the account, which are used as controllers, with one half of your phone’s touchscreen devoted to a large touchpad and two buttons, and the other half a virtual joystick. If that sounds bad, you are right. It's bad.
Imagine, as you sit down to play this game (please don't actually play it) in the modern age, taking control of teams playing in an event that’s going on right around you at this moment, you take one look at the screen and are actually transported back in time to the mid-2000s, to play a game whose animations are so wooden, its gameplay so rigid, its AI so cooked that you'll start worrying about all those sub-prime mortgages you keep reading about in the newspaper.
Look at that screenshot above, which I captured while playing the game on desktop (it's a bit nicer on TV, I'm told, but the game wasn't available on my TV). That's from a replay, a part of sports games where the player models are usually at their best. Now look at the calendar on your own computer or mobile device. Note the year, where it says 2026. Now try and reconcile those two things.
I cannot stress enough how terrible this entire experience is. The mobile controls are clumsy and imprecise in the way all virtual joysticks are, and the swiping motions you need to master to pull off certain moves (like shooting!) are extremely stupid and counter-intuitive. The AI will often not do basic football things; I've seen goalkeepers simply watch long shots fly into the net, and defenders lose all use of their feet when only inches away from an attacker. At no point does it feel like you're playing the sport of football. Instead, it feels like you're wrestling with a facsimile of the sport, a half-forgotten idea of it, relayed through a rusted telegraph line, transcribed on a whiteboard then dunked in mud.
There's an argument that there's a reason the game is so low-fi, that by streaming over Netflix instead of loading from a console or PC compromises had to be made. That we shouldn't expect blockbuster visuals from something you connect a phone to and play on your TV. But that compromise was a choice, on the part of FIFA and Netflix and Delphi, and the underlying technology doesn't excuse how awful the final product has turned out to be, regardless of its visuals.
What the fuck is this! EA Sports FC and eFootball already exist in the world, looking very much like AAA video games, and the former had been home to memorable (or at least functional) tie-in tournaments for decades. Yet here FIFA and Netflix–two of the richest and most powerful organisations on the entire planet--have put their names to a game that looks like it came out on the Nintendo Wii and went straight to the bargain bin.
This whole thing is so bleak. The greed, the laziness, the contempt, all of it, this video game is somehow the encapsulation of almost everything wrong with modern sports, modern entertainment and the cost-cutting executive class. It's simply astounding that a license and event of this scale has been so mishandled. FIFA has had years to plan for this! And for all the billions sloshing around this tournament, lining the pockets of a corrupt world body running a tournament inside a collapsing empire, a generation of football fans raised on perfectly-serviceable updates to annual sports games has this year had a wet bag of dead fish dropped in their lap instead, and been told this is fine, this is just how it works now. Enjoy.
If you're a football fan (or even just a casual observer!) and were thinking of trying to play through your own World Cup this year in a video game, I'd recommend anything but the official release. Don't give it a moment of your time, and don't give Netflix a second of your "engagement", or however the hell they'll track the success (or lack thereof) for this disaster. We all deserve better, much better, than this.
Luke Plunkett
