NEW EA SPORTS GAMES PRO
EA’s FIFA series is increasingly known primarily for the money-extracting Ultimate Team mode, while Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer games’ gradual evolution over the last two years into a free-to-play model appears to have backfired stupendously. On-field soccer simulations have had two long-running competitive series (in addition to Sega’s Football Manager games), but both have started to take hits from critics and fans over the last few years. Overall, the NBA 2K games have been dominant, and the lack of competition has turned them into what Luke Plunkett at Kotaku calls “ a shakedown disguised as a basketball game that is growing as tired as it is exploitative.” It released every year from 1994 to 2010, but has been cancelled five times since 2011, including each of the last two years, with no word so far about a release for the current NBA season. However, outlets including Den of Geek and Business Insider reported last year that the NFL’s exclusivity deal with EA will end in 2025, and 2K is exploring making a non-simulation NFL game.ĢK had competition for a while on the NBA side, with Sony’s San Diego Studio releasing the NBA series from 2004 to 2009, while EA had a longer-running NBA Live series. A few months later that year, EA acquired the exclusive rights to make videogames about the NFL and, according to many critics and fans, the Madden NFL videogame series has suffered in quality due to lack of competition. In 2004, 2K Games released ESPN NFL 2K5, which is still considered one of the best American football games of all time because of its fluid playstyle and gamut of features, some of which Madden is still catching up with. The anecdotal evidence for this is that a lot of sports games are mediocre or stagnant, yet they sell well all the same because they’re the only available game for their respective sports or leagues. It is a generally accepted maxim that competition is good for sports games. How did we get here, and where are we going? Now we enter a brave new future for association football videogames as FIFA keeps its options open while EA profits despite losses of quality and Konami is in an apparent tailspin.
Their prominent exclusive licenses were the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, and Super Cup, but Konami did not renew those 10-year-old deals in 2018.
NEW EA SPORTS GAMES LICENSE
Historically, EA’s biggest competition for the FIFA game has been Konami’s eFootball/Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven series, which was able to license a great many of the players and competitions in world football that FIFA did despite not using FIFA’s name. Strange as it initially felt when I read it, it isn’t all that surprising EA would be interested in NFTs, considering the popularity of and emphasis on the Ultimate Team mode. 15, FIFA announced that they are planning to end their exclusive videogame license with Electronic Arts while also working to expand their esports investments in a manner “best placed to… benefit all football stakeholders.” According to MSN and The New York Times, FIFA wants $1 billion every four years for their naming rights and wants to prevent EA from including real game highlights in their games and exploring NFTs as another way to make money, perhaps because FIFA is intending to do that outside of EA.
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