NBA Video Game Exclusivity

[sterlingice]

http://sports.ign.com/articles/597/597743p1.html

So what's the call all about? It looks like the NBA is not looking to go the exclusive route, at least not in the same way the NFL and MLB signed their deals. Sources tell me that the NBA is instead giving out exclusives to certain games for certain years. In terms of the street genre, the NBA is now mandating that EA's NBA Street series and Midway's NBA Ballers series alternate years. So in 2005, we get NBA Streeet V3. In 2006, we get NBA Ballers 2. In 2007, we'll see NBA Street V4…

As far as the announcement about the sims goes, fans of NBA Live and 2K5 can both take a deep breath and relax. Both series will continue to compete with each other on a yearly basis, making for the only real videogame sports battle still in existence, with the NFL and MLB on lock, and the NHL on lockout.

The NBA did the smart thing. They limited the street games so there's time for some innovation from each company in games that require more innovation than updating. However, there's still competition for the main game, which is good because those need competition to drive their innovation, otherwise, they'd just release the same game every year ala Madden. Great call by the NBA.

SI

[dawgfan]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

The NBA did the smart thing. They limited the street games so there's time for some innovation from each company in games that require more innovation than updating. However, there's still competition for the main game, which is good because those need competition to drive their innovation, otherwise, they'd just release the same game every year ala Madden. Great call by the NBA.

SI

Having worked on that brutal yearly schedule for sports games, I can say that it wouldn't have been a bad thing if the NBA had gone the same route on their sim games as they did the street games. It allow development teams enough time to actually spend working on real innovation as well as bug fixing the previous version. That was a big problem we had - we knew we had areas we wanted to improve upon from the last version, and they needed time to be addressed correctly, but marketing always insisted on a number of "new" features they could use to drive their marketing campaigns, and so we'd have a mish-mash of semi-fixed existing stuff with semi-tuned new stuff.

Granted, our staffing wasn't nearly as much as EA or even Sega, so that further compromised what we could accomplish in a yearly cycle, but having an extra year and publishing every other year would've been so much better for our product. And, if you limit the releases to one publisher per year, you might not see any real drop in income from doing it yearly, since you'd have exclusivity the year you're allowed to release.