Outside of a certain Milton Bradley board game, people aren’t typically fond of monopolies. The last few weeks, however, have seen events occur which will lead to them in sports video games.
In early December, Electronic Arts announced that they had reached an exclusive contract with the NFL and the Players Inc. to create and distribute football games for the next five years. As if this didn’t hurt other developers enough, a later announcement of yet another exclusive contract, this time with ESPN, crushed any hopes that they might have had.
EA’s popular Madden franchise had long been winning the war for dominance in the market, with Sega’s “NFL 2K” games straggling along for the past few years. In what will go down as one of Sega’s bolder marketing moves, they lowered the price of “NFL 2K5” this past year, hoping it would help them compete with “Madden.”
Much to EA’s chagrin, Sega was able to take away a huge share of their sales. With that success in tow, they were looking primed to make a bona fide run at stealing Madden’s dominance this fall. That is, until EA bullied them out of the football market.
Then, this past week, another shocking announcement came, this time from Major League Baseball. Beginning in 2006 and lasting for seven years, Take Two Interactive will have exclusive third-party rights to develop games for the MLB. While this doesn’t prevent Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony from creating their own baseball games, it does provide a slap to the face of EA.
Whether this was retaliation or not isn’t an issue. What is alarming is what might be a new trend of sports games only being developed by one company, with no real competition from anyone else.
Furthering the situation, the NBA has been talking about signing three different deals, each being genre-exclusive. Essentially, they plan to assign one publisher to simulation games, one to arcade and street-style titles and another to portables. Unlike the NFL and MLB, the NBA has rejected bids for an all-inclusive contract on multiple occasions. People have speculated that the NBA will make an announcement soon, but little is known about which companies will get the licenses.
The video game industry, as a whole, stands to be hurt by these limited deals. EA and Take Two might be basking in the fact that they are the only ones who get to create games for their specific licenses, but what will this do to other programmers?
People may try to argue that Sega can just create a generic “Football 2K6” title for this fall and it would still sell, but that’s absurd. If anyone remembers, Madden was without an NFL license a few years back and tried to release a game with real players, but fake teams, stadiums and uniforms. While beating the Chicago Bulldozers mercilessly was still entertaining, the game sold poorly and EA was quick to pay the money needed for NFL rights.
Another concern is the likelihood that Madden will take their laziness to a whole new level and give gamers even fewer upgrades with every new release. It was bad enough this past year when they tried to flaunt their new “hit-stick” game-play mechanic as a selling point. What will happen when Sega isn’t nipping at their heels? One could guess that EA will merely update rosters and throw in some new commentary without improving their already adequate game play. The adage “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” can only go so far, and EA needs to make a legitimate attempt at giving fans something new.
EA is quickly becoming the Disney of the video game world, throwing around money in an effort to buy good games. Utilizing a combination of multiple successful franchises, they have made a name for themselves in pop culture. What other game has been featured during prime time programming on a major network?
After their new deal with the NFL, Electronic Arts holds the full house of gaming franchises in their hands. Everything from James Bond to The Lord of the Rings rests in the EA stable.
The main problem with EA is their tendency to turn out mediocre games, simply due to overextending themselves. If they didn’t have some strange obligation to buy every possibly profitable franchise, maybe they could put proper development time into every title they release. The company’s announcement that “The Godfather” will soon be digitized makes it seem like EA is determined to purchase the rights to every successful movie franchise and make video games using them.
Although “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” was one of the best action offerings in the past year, “Catwoman” and “GoldenEye: Rogue Agent” both fell a little short of industry standards. Had EA let other developers take a shot at making titles with these coveted franchises, maybe the game market wouldn’t be so flooded with second-rate games whose main selling points are their licenses.
Licensing has never been much of a problem in the gaming industry, but things are rapidly changing. Amazing game play is often overshadowed by a big-name property, hurting developers who can’t afford to buy success. Until larger development houses remember their humble roots and realize how much they’re hurting the same industry that they helped build, things look grim.
