YOU get the sense Strikerz Inc. CEO Eugene Nashilov has seen something no one else has.
That’s the only way to explain why he’s sat in his Cyprus studio building a game to take on the mighty EA Sports FC.
Considering Strikerz Inc. started with four people in 2018 and now sits at around 320 in 2024, he’s not the only one who believes in UFL.
The free-to-play football game releases in September on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and as Nashilov tells me, he’s coming for EA FC’s crown.
GLHF: What areas did you want to innovate on?
Eugene Nashilov: When we were deciding on how we want to go into this competition, we understood that going with this classical way, doing pretty much the same approach to game modes…would not work.
Once we understood that this is not going to work, then we came to this idea that we need to restructure the game so that it is played and felt differently, and that’s how we came up with the idea that we want our fantasy.
Basically, we create clubs and we make deals with players to play for these clubs.
It’s like a fantasy in some way, and so we wanted to become this centerpiece of the product, so that you could easily download the game without any barriers.
So it’s free-to-play. You won’t have to have a PSN subscription or Xbox subscription. You don’t need these subscriptions to play UFL.
If you have these subscriptions, though, we will give you some additional content and stuff to enjoy the game, but it has to be super accessible, and so these are the two core ideas.
They basically led to everything else.
It is definitely different from the competitors, so if you speak about the core part of the game, I would say that we’re trying to deliver an experience which is, first of all, fun… but you have to keep in mind that basically what we are doing is that we’re trying to put 90 minutes of a real football match in eight minutes of a digital football match, and thus all the speeds, all the actions need time.
You need to receive a ball in real life and spend some seconds to do that.
But if you will have a few seconds to receive the ball in a game, you will just get stuck in a situation where you cannot do anything with your gamepad.
You’re just waiting for the animation to play, and this makes the game so unresponsive and thus you just cannot go for exclusively simulation.
Is it more realistic than PES?
I think they had a great community who loved Master League and stuff, and you know, it just was a good game.
The problem with it was it was not popular online, and this online aspect of it is actually the deciding factor nowadays, because people are used to playing together, either in one team or versus each other.
And so their model, which was more or less realistic, it took more time to do stuff.
If you combine it with the online experience, where you will get latency issues, you basically scale the problem of low responsiveness.
Plus, they started with this idea that it will be cross-platform, like you will have a guy playing on a console and a guy playing on mobile and they can be playing versus each other.
This was the concept they went with when they were going for the open test for eFootball, and so this also did not work out, because to us it was pretty obvious it’s not gonna work out, because when you’re playing on a console, you are expected to spend some time there.
You’re sitting, there’s a TV, you want to spend some quality time, and when you’re playing on mobile, you could be commuting on a subway or anywhere, and so you’re playing and then something happens and you need to quit.
What was the first football game you played, and what is your favourite football game?
I remember playing the early versions of FIFA on PC.
Then they had this World Cup edition that came further on with World Cup 2002, or the Millennium one, where you had this arcade element where you could just hold the shoot button for a long time and you will have this fiery ball that, basically, will score from any place around the pitch.
UFL was originally meant to release in 2022. Why was postponed?
I think that we’ve hit a number of force majeures through the course of development.
So, basically, we’re in development for almost eight years — eight years ago we were four people.
So it was me, Max, our CDO, my partner, and 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 also trying to drive it… for the first five years we had to work under the radar, so we were not vocal about we’re actually doing this, because we did not want media attention at that time, because what we felt was we don’t want to share our story before it looks like a solid story.
Because if we said we’re working on a football simulator that’s designed to compete with EA and Konami, everyone would just laugh at us.
And that’s OK because you know, it’s a very complicated task.
EA has more than 1,000 people working on a title like that, and so that was the process.
Then, back in the territories where we had lots of people, war started and so we had to move people out and reorganize once again.
So it was a lot of administrative and organizational work that we had to move people out and reorganize once again.
What’s the extent of Ronaldo’s investment?
How much I cannot say. The truth is we had a consortium of investors and the total amount invested was 40 million, and he’s part of the consortium.
Does he consult on the game?
So of course we talk to him and his team regularly.
I cannot 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 have had a number of issues through the course of our production which were exactly this issue…
But in the general sense, in the vibe from the football, the way it all looks, the way characters move and stuff, do they feel natural?
We try to ask questions to him, his team — do the movements look realistic to you? Do the tricks look realistic, the transitions between them?
Would you say you exchange messages with Ronaldo’s team on a weekly basis?
Weekly. Yeah, emails, it’s WhatsApp and it’s calls sometimes.
We are in a close contact because we have to do a lot of things that are related to the brand and so we do a lot of stuff on social media, and so we have a lot of contact with them, and how we can do a more interesting type of a project, or how we can make the some kind of a 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 of the areas that you think need some work?
The first thing we’re working on is smoothness, which is a very general notion, right, but still it’s related to basically all the features and their transitions between them: locomotion, dribbling, ball reception, ball physics and collisions between the players.
So all these things combined, they attribute to smoothness.
So we work on smoothness a lot.
Second thing we work on is ball reception.
We’re heavily working on that because sometimes players still miss the ball in situations where they should not be missing it… when you get your game online and there is latency, it adds up to the most problematic areas that you have just multiplies, so you have to fix it.
Third thing would definitely be AI.
We are working a lot on AI, both attacking AI and 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 also general responsiveness that we work on.
It’s a lot less related to the mechanics rather than to servers, networking and all that.
And regarding the networking, we have a current model.
We are updating it in a number of ways and we will continue further on.
I’m not sure when it is going to happen, but we will release a version two that will eliminate some of the waste related to time and latency, so it will become even more responsive further in time.
It sounds like there are a lot of things that need to be worked on. How confident are you you’re going to hit your next release date?
We’re pretty confident we’ll make it.
Sure 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 have said already, we have a backlog for ten years to work on features.
The thing is rather to understand when the game is in suitable quality to release, because we are a game as-a-service business model, which basically means we’ll be updating the game regularly.
This is not the same case as with our competitors because they release an annual product and though they do update the game with content and stuff, it’s still an annual product, and at the end of the year they abandon it and launch a new one.
Operation and live ops is part of the story that we’re building and that we want to actually engage the audience with, because what we’re saying is like, look, maybe this is not perfect, but we will be working on this system.
What’s the current size of the studio?
So it’s approximately 320 people.
So 110 people working on UFL in-house plus approximately 100 more working with us as an outsourcing effort in all possible areas
How many people do you see working on it next year?
I think we’ll hire approximately 100 more, through the course of one year’s operation.
Where does the money come from?
First of all, it’s all related to customization, just like you have in Fortnite.
So you customize your players, how they look, the kit you play in, the stadium you play at and all these things.
Second thing, it’s also the vanity items. We’ll have a lot of boots and unique logos and unique kit designs. Some of them will be custom, basically designed by us. Some will be branded. We’ll have a lot of brand integrations, and when you think of the biggest brands we think about in relation to football items like boots and balls and stuff, we’ll have these in the game.
The third part would be power-ups.
Basically, what power-ups do is they speed you off in progress, so you just make more money out of every match and thus you can faster get to better players. So that’s another thing, and also, besides that, we also have skins. I think that’s an important thing.
For more on the game, check out an UFL preview we did last year.
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