Slashdot Mirror
In Depth Reactions to EA / ESPN Deal
Gamespot has a piece up about industry analyst reactions to the EA / ESPN deal. They span the gamut from appreciation for a smart business move to a frustration with a company throwing its weight around. From the article: "Has the fat lady finally sung in the sports-game wars? Should all the other publishers pack it in and head for the showers? Opinions are mixed, but this week's news was one of the year's biggest wins--for Electronic Arts. Now, the industry girds for a string of earnings calls where executives at publicly traded companies--EA and others--will surely face a grilling from curious analysts."
If it means that next years Madden on the PC is a finely polished product then I'm all for it. Probably won't happen though.
Awww shucks,
that looks like an interesting article.
However, I can't spare the time to read it.
Sincerely,
EA Employee.
Just because EA locked up ESPN branding doesn't mean the others are going to just go away. If the EA line stagnates because they rest on their branding prowess, then others will step in. I can't say its good for the gaming industry, but I certainly don't think its a death knell.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I know you can make a game configurable enough to have names and rosters and even uniformans for real NFL teams be downloadable but on the marketing front is where I think any non-EA unit will struggle since their commercials won't have the rela players.
On the upside, it might force all non-EA game makers to really upgrade their products on the gameplay front since they will have to win by knockout on the "This game is just hands down better than Madden".
Still, I uspect given the general populations proclivities we've seen the end of "major" competition to EA in the NFL arean so get ready for Madden 2005 to be the stanard game you'll be playing until, oh say, 2010.
When there's one football game, one baseball game, one hockey game simply because companies have exclusive rights to the NFL, MBL, and NHL and their respective entities.
I could care less about whether it's branded ESPN, but if EA signs a deal with the NFL and Madden's the only football game on the block I'm going to be pissed.
John Madden, Al Michaels, and guess who... Chris Berman doing the halftime and postgame. That's what I believe they will try to sell out of the gates. I sure hope hope they work on gameplay and introducing new features as well in Madden. That was the beauty of having competition in the market, you could look at the competitor and think, "How do we top that?"
I sure hope we do not have stale games with roster updates and better graphics.
- Sonnyjz
The first thing that came to my mind when I heard it was that "long contracts mean weak projections." You have to have a lot of years to demand a lot of dollars. If ESPN's projections for growth in this arena were better, there'd be a lot more pressure for shorter contracts so they could return to the auction block sooner.
[
EA 1, Customers 0
Madden 95 for the Sega Genesis was indeed a kick-ass game and I'm glad to see them offering it in this form. But of course, there's the huge drawback of having ancient players on there that nobody cares about -- I'd rather play as TEAM PITTSBURGH with QB#7 than the Steelers with Neil O'Donnell. And good thing my favorite team isn't the Ravens, or the Texans, or the Titans (well, that's a good thing anyway).
Why didn't they think to throw the brand new teams and rosters onto the old Madden 95 shell? Wouldn't that be sweet to play an old game like that and get to use Michael Vick or LaDainian Tomlinson (or whomever)? I haven't kept up with the emulation scene lately but if I recall correctly, a lot of guys work hard to recreate those old sports games with new players -- I can't imagine that for a game like Madden 95, EA would have to spend much time at all adapting it given that they have all the data and licensing on hand already.
audioLibre - freedom of music
Isn't so much that they screwed Sega over, yet again, or that real NFL players won't be in any Sega football game, or that the teams won't be either. You could very easily create fake teams that looked like their real-life counterparts, and players that mimicked the real ones, then jsut give options to change the names on everything. The thing you can't get around, however, is that they can't use the real stadiums.
And, as far as I know, they don't have an exclusive license on college football. I think Sega should refocus their efforts on college football, and simply blow away the market while they still have a chance.
I've heard some talk of a series that's kind of like the tv series Playmakers, also something about a All Pro game using maybe people from the Hall of Fame (they are not part of the NFL Players Association anymore)
but what about just going with the old XFL? there was some pretty cools tuff in there that could make a video game quite fun... and it's got to be pretty cheap, same idea and all behind it, but you can go nuts with the features since XFL probably would have liked them...
All you need is to remember "He Hate Me"
A few out-of-context statements from a bunch of financial analysts is in depth analysis now?
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
As always, when someone corners a market, this is the time for other companies to look at what makes sports games fun and come at this from a brand new angle. Sports games that abstract away some of the rules of the game to increase action or speed, new sports, new types of players (but more thought out than "what about Orcs with football helmets?" or "hey what if the players were robots?" type of ideas) though a Warcraft style sport game where teams can be made up of different races and players can mix and match to their hearts content would be interesting...
Anyway, whether these are stupid ideas or not, now is the time for game designers to innovate instead of whine about EA. If they get truly desperate, they can always go and find some Finnish computer science student who's been thinking about designing a game engine. I hear they have great ideas...
I look at it this, the glass is half-full, way. The ESPN license will change the EA football franchise away from Madden. Because, the way I see it, Madden is one of the weakest parts of that franchise. I like Al Michaeals on the play-by-play, but all the repetative MAdden-isms are awful.
I preferred the ESPN football the last few years. The gameplay was better in ESPN/Sega, but not so much so that one was much better than the other. But the voice over work was much less irritating and made for a better game experience.
The exclusivity for EA and the NFL is a serious problem and I think it will lower the innovation in the football genre and it concerns me greatly, but ESPN licensing, is not that big of a deal to me.
I posted this on a previous story, but now it's truly on-topic. I did a comic strip about this on Wednesday.
The thing that's galling about this is the amount of lip-service that EA has given in the past to supporting the video game ecosystem. They've maintained they don't want to be the only video game developer, they just want to be the best. However, as soon as they are faced with truly healthy competition, their response is to burn a lot of resources killing it off. EA was never in danger of losing the NFL license, and the ESPN brand carries less weight than the Madden brand in the football game market. They have mentioned some possible features with ESPN data-feeds, but to me this deal just feels like insult to injury.
Wake me up when Mario Golf out sells Tiger Woods PGA Tour.
Midway is already working on a new Blitz title, and according to them they're happy to not have the NFL license because the league asked them to tone down the hard hitting and trash talk and now they have no such restrictions.
Lots of games are sold at Christmas time by people who aren't necessarily gamers. A brand name helps assure buyers - nobody ever got tossed out of Christmas dinner for buying ESPN.
Combined with the NFL exclusive deal, this is one hell of a shot across the bow of all of EA's competitors.
CT
Why didn't they think to throw the brand new teams and rosters onto the old Madden 95 shell?
Simple, how are they going to sell the new game. The only major reason for buying the latest Madden - or any sports game is to upgrade to the latest teams/players/stats/etc... Marketing people would never allow them to sell Madden 95 with an updated roster.
Find coupons in Greeley
Of course, with European football (soccer) I guess you need uneven teams just to make sure that someone's going to get on the scoreboard... God what a boring game. Why don't they widen the goals or something? Jesus.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
ESPN has destroyed sports, from the way they are anazlyed, viewed and even played.
Take the NBA for instance. The game has changed and become a league where players are more concerned with getting on SportsCenter, than actually playing well and winning. Being on SportsCenter, probably means you made some amazing dunk and therefore will be getting notoriety for a quiet inconsequently part of the game.
On the analysis front, ESPN does a great job of injecting meaningless storylines into games. They over analyze sports, bring up meaningless statistics and really loose focus on the most important part of sports, the actual athletic contest.
This a terrible move for the future of sports games. ESPN will undoubtedly bash sports fans over the head with overblown tie-ins and advertisements.
For someone who loves sports and video games, I'm saddened by this corporate sponsorship.
100% Insightful