[RaychelSnr]

The Sporting News has a story up about NASCAR's new plan to abandon exclusive agreements in favor of signing deals with several developers instead:

Quote:

When Electronic Arts and NASCAR decided to end their 12-year, exclusive partnership last year, the sanctioning body went back to the drawing board to hash out a new strategy for its gaming business. The resulting strategy will see NASCAR eschew the traditional plan of signing an exclusive deal with a publisher such as EA in favor of signing a multitude of deals with a number of developers who will design games across a variety of platforms. It has signed three deals to implement its strategy. Its new roster of gaming partners includes iRacing, which developed an online simulation game; Sony, which will feature NASCAR for the first time in the popular racing game Grand Turismo; and Eutechnyx, a video game developer from Great Britain that created a new NASCAR game slated for release by Activision in February. NASCAR hopes to build on those relationships by adding other agreements with developers that can create games for iPads and iPhones, Facebook and other platforms.

It seems to be a positive direction at least for NASCAR. As to whether this will ever spill over into other sports leagues, I'm not sure what the odds of that are at this point. Next up in the license free agent market is Baseball, so we will know more in the next year or so if exclusivity is something which is ending as quickly as it began or not.