[VCdolphin]

Mark Cuban is the biggest name associated with the UFL at the moment, but they seem to have a solid plan on how to build a league. A $25-30 million salary cap, so the players will get decent money, even by NFL standards, and each owner has to put up the money to keep the team running for 3 years.

Will it work? The odds are, I'd guess, about 50-50 the UFL lasts for more than 3 years, but they ARE learning from the mistakes of the USFL and XFL (among others).

It's not hard to see the opportunity for 2K Sports that the UFL would bring. They'll NEVER see the NFL license again, but a UFL game lets them create a Franchise mode that everyone understands (tell me how you do that with NFL legends) and they could allow you to expand the UFL league to NFL-like numbers of teams (just leave the create-a-team mode in from APF).

Being able to release a new game EVERY year is very important too, as you spread out development costs. I bet it would cost less to get a UFL license for the first few years than it did to sign all the legends.

I will say that if VC is doing some work on a 2K9 game, that is encouraging, even if we don't see it this year. They may try a 09 release, and see how that goes, before calling it a day on APF football. I think you could argue that by then the number of nextgen consoles sold will be in the 30-40 million range, and thus better odds of bigger sales for a niche type football game.