Sony should take a shot with college basketball 🏀

[boomhauertjs]

I'll be shocked if we ever get a college game from the big studios. They never really sold well and it would take a significant investment to get it up and running. The best chance would be for an indie studio to make a game that wasn't licensed, but had great customization options, a la Legend Bowl or Super Mega Baseball.

[MHammer113]

Quote: Originally Posted by boomhauertjs

I'll be shocked if we ever get a college game from the big studios. They never really sold well and it would take a significant investment to get it up and running. The best chance would be for an indie studio to make a game that wasn't licensed, but had great customization options, a la Legend Bowl or Super Mega Baseball.

I have no concrete evidence otherwise, but I don’t buy this. There hasn’t been a college basketball game for 13 years, the appetite is absolutely there. Not only that, but 2k has the framework to build off the NBA engine. Not only that, but the ability to have digital downloads, more platforms owned and the ability to package it with the NBA product makes it much more appealing. I understand college football is more popular, but look at the social media buzz that came with the announcement of College Football by EA. Maybe it’s not a yearly installment, but I feel like it has a huge profit potential

[boomhauertjs]

Quote:

So, what about for college sports? While there isn’t much information on licensing costs for college basketball games, Kotaku’s Owen Good revealed information on how much top universities were being paid for EA Sports to use their trademarks in its NCAA Football series. According to a 2013 article he wrote, some colleges were being paid over $75,000 for use of their trademarked names and logos. He also drew a correlation between Associated Press (AP) poll ranking and costs of using trademarks. If a program was perennially ranked in the AP top 25, they would get “top payout level,” which EA Sports proposes is a minimum of $78,000. By now it should be clear that making a sports game costs boatloads of money, so now let’s take a look at the sales. EA Sports’ NCAA Basketball 2010, the last college basketball game ever made, sold 155,000 copies across all platforms the year of its release. Yikes. Assuming all of those sold at the full price tag of $60 (which is unlikely), that means it made about $9.3 million in sales. That’s pretty pitiful considering it had no competition. Now think about the fact that the game included 325 official teams. To break even on licensing alone, EA would’ve had to pay out an average of $28,615 per team. Since the series was less popular than NCAA Football, one could assume schools weren’t asking for as much money to use their trademarks. However, one could also assume that blue-blood programs like Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Kansas asked for well over $30,000. It’s all speculation, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the weak sales numbers weren’t enough to cover the costs of licensing, not to mention development. When you think of it that way, it’s no wonder EA put the kibosh on the series.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thevide...deo-games/amp/



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[boomhauertjs]

Combine all of the above with the fact that the players would also need to get paid, I can’t see how an officially licensed college hoops game would ever happen.


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[MHammer113]

Keep in mind the video game world was much different in 2009. There wasn’t the ability to create a game with expansive customization, there were millions less consoles and games were not downloadable off the internet. Combine that with the fact that there is a thirst for a game that has not been available for over a decade. I’m choosing to look at the pros, not the cons. Also keep in mind, EA shipped a broken product with NCAA 10 and never fixed it. People were not happy with it

[MHammer113]

And as a follow up, College Hoops 2k5 sold about 700k copies so if the game is done, marketed and moved correctly, it can be profitable.

[canes21]

Quote: Originally Posted by MHammer113

And as a follow up, College Hoops 2k5 sold about 700k copies so if the game is done, marketed and moved correctly, it can be profitable.

I'd like to see what Choops 2k8 sold. It was enough for me to not buy the NCAA Basketball games, at least new. I bought a couple on sale or used, but never new because I always ended up going back to 2k8. I'd imagine I'm not alone in that regard.

I also wonder if EA was paying these schools for the ability to use them in both games. It's one thing if they were paying $75,000 to use a school in only the basketball game. It is completely different if that cost allowed them to use them in both the football and basketball games.

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[MHammer113]

From the research I have done, Choops 2k8 sold around 275,000 copies. The most copies sold in the series was around 700,000 in 2k5. I really would love to learn more about the licensing and get a better understanding of how EA is handling College Football for next year.

Also im very curious to see how they will handle customization. In reality if they just updated arenas and such, people could essentially customize everything else.