How a game gets into the library

PES is a curated platform, which is a polite way of saying we say no a great deal. We carry twelve titles. We have evaluated somewhat over four hundred.

The process is unglamorous. A member of the curation team plays a submitted title to its natural end — the credits for a narrative game, a competitive season for a multiplayer one, roughly twenty hours for anything open-ended. They write an internal assessment that the studio never sees, and a second curator plays enough to agree or disagree with it.

What we are testing for is not quality in the abstract. It is whether the game is finished, whether it respects the player's time, and whether the studio behind it can support it for the years we intend to carry it. A brilliant game from a team that will not exist in eighteen months is a bad outcome for the people who buy it.

Studios we carry are on revenue-share agreements with no exclusivity clause. We do not ask a studio to stay off other platforms, and we do not pay for the privilege of being first. If a game we carry does better elsewhere, that is a signal about us rather than about them.