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Originally Posted by kjcheezhead |
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I think this is a real possibility. EA did away with the FIFA license and that game is way more popular worldwide than Madden. I think EA is starting to feel like it’s better to pay less in licensing fees and deal with the loss of market share from a competitor. I don’t know if the NFL still sees the benefit of 2 games but if EA is over the cost of exclusivity the NFL doesn’t have a choice.
That would be the best possible situation for gamers. 2ks game has to be non-sim now, but they would want to keep the game pretty realistic in art style and movement if they want this to be the foundation to build a simulation game on in a couple years. My City NFL version seems to fit this bill perfectly and 2k has built that for the NBA already.
Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports
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I think there are a couple important points of distinction here which makes the FIFA situation unique.
First, the FIFA organization is rather famously corrupt. It is likely that organization has an overinflated value of itself and was asking for way too much money to continue the relationship. Heck, after EA announced they were ending the license, FIFA issued a rather adversarial counter statement saying they would continue to produce “THE BEST” soccer games under their label.
Second, EA Sports already has exclusive licenses for many of the major soccer leagues worldwide. Use of those league licenses and player likenesses doesn’t require FIFA’s sign-off. The value EA was receiving from the FIFA brand was actually pretty minimal? I don’t think a similar argument can be made about the NFL brand contributing little value to the Madden series. That shield matters, there is no other major football league available to license. The NFL is synonymous with the sport of football itself in a way that FIFA is not with soccer.
To that end, I doubt EA would be willing to put themselves in a position of losing Madden NFL by allowing a different company to sign an exclusive license and sweep the NFL away from them, be it Take 2, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Epic, or any other company loosely involved in video games with lots of money to burn. We all know that the NFL loves exclusive agreements, and it is the most popular televised property in America, so I have to imagine there are plenty of companies that would readily cough up the dough to make an exclusively licensed NFL product unopposed if EA chose to not do so.