MVP Baseball 2005.
In a talk yesterday at the Wedbush Technology Conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the company
was considering adding, "a couple of new sports franchises" to the companies lineup.
Jorgenson continued, "For us, the big opportunities continue to be the FIFA franchise, the Battlefield franchise and then the core sports of Madden, NCAA, NHL, adding NBA and possibly a couple of new sports franchises along that way. Clearly, that's a big strength of the company and we want to continue that."
What Jorgenson didn't say, and what sports gamers are inevitably concerned about is does this mean already known licensed properties such as the UFC license, or could it mean a return of MVP Baseball in the coming year?
Jorgenson gave no indication of what his words truly meant, so you can take them however you will. NBA Live and UFC are both expected to see releases within the next year from EA and they are certainly 'new' sports titles as neither have appeared in EA's release lineup in recent years. But Jorgenson's comments seemed to indicate there was a possibility of a third title which hasn't been mentioned yet.
MLB Baseball makes the most sense, with Take Two's third party license expired once again, its clear the MLB wants a strong publisher presence on the XBox platform. Given the minimal effort it seems that was put into
MLB 2K13, it seems clearly possible this year was used as a stopgap year for another publisher to get a franchise online. But for now, we can only wait to see what comes of the MLB licensing situation. [
Polygon]
[Update]: Owen
at Kotaku received an update from EA. "Blake's referring to
UFC and the ongoing evolution of our biggest sports titles into new markets and on new platforms (like
FIFA Online 3 in Korea,
FIFA on mobile in Japan,
Madden on mobile)."
So perhaps we can put the MVP talk to bed? At least for now...