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EA Signs College Football License Deal
Yet another license falls into the hands of the EA sports game crafters. The Business Wire is reporting that EA Games has signed a six year agreement with the Collegiate Licensing Company. This allows EA the exclusive use of teams, stadiums, etc, etc. From the article: "Our NCAA football franchise is a key element in our EA SPORTS brand lineup and we are pleased to have secured the NCAA license...There is an unrivaled loyalty our fans have for the game, and this agreement with CLC allows EA to continue to deliver to fans the best, most innovative college football experience now and for years to come."
"Not to mention, this all will wind up creating backdoor, Internet-assisted "player editing" capabilities in competitors' games. PS2 and XBox Internet users will certainly be able to sneakily insert all the "official" information into the games. At least, I hope."
I think its more likely that they'll just stop making NCAA football games. I know unofficailly its been done in the past but considering how much it costs to develop and market a game these days I can just see where eventually you have one nfl game, one ncaa game etc by the end of this deal. I mean Christ a six year exclusive contract? How is that possibly good in any way? Do they have any idea how much power they are putting in EA's hands? With these deals alone they could make or break ANY console. What's that Microsoft? You don't want to do X,Y, and Z and pay us $50 million in kickbacks? Well then, no football for your console for the next 5 years!
This is so wrong.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Maybe EA will get off of its ass and make NCAA Football for the PC, instead of just PS2, because they'll need to try to recoup the license cost? I hope so, because I wanted to try the game out, but couldn't...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
"Am I missing anything?"
Yeah..."We're geeks, sports suck, who cares".
The last time there was a story that touched on Football here, there were a lot of posts along the lines of "I hate sports, the jocks beat me up in high school", etc. The whole "geeks have to be wusses that hate sports" thing chaps my ass.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
And to get the standard replies out of the way:
1. Yep.
2. Not really. You don't need the players' or teams' names to make a football game. I remember some of the old ones calling their teams just "Denver" and "Chicago," with modified logos and player names spelled differently than the real ones. Even a randomly generated roster would work - and could work BETTER, for replay value. Even then, can one type of game make a monopoly? Saying that would lead us to say that Sega has a monopoly on games like Sonic, or that Bioware has a monopoly on Star Wars RPGs. Even taking into account all the other games that EA makes, they're still not a monopoly. Big, yes. Biggest, certainly. But they're still not even a majority of the video game industry, let alone a monopoly.
3. For the same reason nobody's done anything about Microsoft. When the gorrilla wants the best seat in the monkey house, the capuchins aren't going to pursuade him to move.
3a. Great and fine, but you'll never get enough people behind it. Try, though, even an unheard and unnoticed protest is a protest just the same.
4. As a consumer, you also have the right to influence other consumers. By telling them WHY EA is a bad company, you hope to also get them to excercise their rights as consumers.
5. And if somebody made a football game with mutants now, it wouldn't be innovation. NFL Blitz was innovation, but now if another game goes that route, it won't be innovative either. Where does it go from here? Invent a new, simmilar game? Is it still football at that point?
6. I don't remember them being good before 92 either.
A company acting in its best interests is different than a company acting against its customers' best interests. But it's not illegal, so it must be ok, right? This is the nasty side of capitalism, when competition is factored out.
And let's say the next few EA football games are great. That won't exactly be any surprise. It's not like they've been terrible all these years and people buy them anyway. Sports games in general aren't my cup of tea, but Madden and the like are polished games, gripping to those who are into the genre. They have, however, been a bit stale lately, if I understand correctly. How much more innovative or realistic or detailed can a football game get? Video game football has looked almost like the real thing since the Dreamcast. We still use joysticks and buttons, we still pick plays... How much improvement is really going to happen?
The short answer is, not a lot. EA knows that not much is going to happen in terms of making next year's football game better than this year's. That's exactly the problem -- not that there won't be progress, but that EA _knows_ there won't be progress. With that as a given, they've decided to tie up the market. If there's no innovation to be done, well dammit, we want to be the only ones here! Where the players lose is where that "fact" is broken. Say Sega or 989 Studios or somebody _did_ come up with a genuinely fresh idea for a football game. Say there actually _is_ room for improvement. Well, now that's just too bad. If you're not EA, you can't make a football game and expect it to sell now. Even if your innovation is the greatest thing ever to happen to sports games, you're fooling yourself if you think it will sell without any actual teams attached to it. And then EA's game next year will just hijack your idea anyway. Nobody wins here except EA. Not other developers, but more importantly, not players either.
this is precisely one of the things that I worry about, that they'll indeed just repackage a pro game with some different logos, and that just wouldn't be the same.
It's not like college football and pro football are significantly different. The core engine should be the same, it's the same sport. The only slight tweaks you can really do are off the field, with the primary difference being recruiting vs contract negotiations. Everything else you can do would just be there to add "flavor." Making sure players go to class isn't a compelling feature, and the NCAA probably doesn't want the game to deal with arrests, illegal booster contributions, etc.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Yes and no. You have to make sure the game plays well with the differences of college and pro. The Option is still run by various teams in college. There are more teams and more variety of offenses. Speed in the pro game negates the option and has other influences in the game. The designers, developers and testers must make sure that the changes in rules, players, advantage to home team, atmosphere are adequately incaptured in the game. Maybe no significant difference, but A LOT of minor differences (both on and off the field).
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Most NCAA games allows you to edit your player names and stats for this very reason. It lets you recreate your home team (or the whole bloody league) unencumbered by the restriction against "students" having conflicts of interest.
While I would like to see a swing towards more fantasy-based and original takes on sports, like Cyberball, I'm not holding my breath. It's very difficulty to sell fantasy sports games to publishers, because even if an accurate sports game is junk it will still sell ok, but the next Cyberball may sell as well as, well, Cyberball. Certainly some pseudo super games have had success more recently than that, like NFL blitz and NBA Jams, but both had official licenses. But the more creative you are, the less likely you are to get the broad market of people who like a sport and who want to play a game that is exactly like that sport.
I agree, though, that exclusivity contracts are likely to run your sport into the ground. Madden has stayed good over the years because of the constant competition. If that were over, the series would stagnate and fail like it almost did at the beginning of the PS1 era. Exclusivity just reduces the value of the property.
I don't know that is enough to make or brake any console, but it certainly doesn't help MS or Nintendo or Sony's position.
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