A message for everyone complaining about the
recently announced rosters, was posted by Brian Hayes, AKA "Brizzo", Producer/Designer of
Fight Night Champion, over at the EA Forums.
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"It's that time of year again. You win some, you lose some.
I'm not happy about it either. This is what Fight Night and KO Kings has gone through every year and it's never easy. Contracts are signed with fighters for a certain period of time and when they expire, we can't be certain we'll be able to reach another agreement with any of them.
- Some boxers were signed to deals over 3 years ago when things were pretty different, financially-speaking.
- All of the boxers that we lost were contacted, some of them several times by myself personally.
- I'm not kidding when I say this, sometimes we just don't hear back. Even from people we worked with previously.
- I personally had communications with one boxer - and his three different managers - over the course of 6 months.
- Arturo Gatti died under very suspicious circumstances. Sorry that we weren't able to re-do that contract in the wake of that. We would have signed him for an extra 2 years way back if we had known he was going to die.
- Some guys we had to drop because of a lawsuit last year, you might recall.
- Sometimes we have have verbal agreements in place with guys we really want and because of time-pressures we spend thousands of dollars making them. Only to have them make further demands, attempt to renegotiate, or simply fail to send us signed paperwork. So poof! They're off the roster and we just burned that money. I can tell you how much Mike looooooves that.
- Some guys just have unrealistic demands.
Now, I know you probably don't care about this. The game doesn't have some of the guys you want, end of story. But like I've been saying for years, its not like boxing is chock-full of stand-up guys accustomed to a strict code of business ethics - nor is it populated by an abundance of athletes with a realistic perception of their brand value and/or mainstream appeal.
NOTE: Some guys are absolutely great. Very professional and very helpful.
All I'm saying is, we try our best and we didn't make the business of professional boxing an absolute cluster****." |
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