EA Signs Exclusive Deal With ESPN

#1 Sounds like EA has been planning an attack to own major professional sports for some time now - it's like watching dominos fall...

#2 If this doesn't prove that EA is out to kill competition I don't know what to say.

#3 This is ridiculous. Business shouldn't be conducted like this.

Make a better product, charge people less money, or come up with something innovative ... don't just buy out the competition's ability to compete because they came up with a good fair strategy which helped the consumer. Everyone will suffer now.

This along with them buying up everyone (DICE and maybe UBISoft) is really awful. There was a good movie that was a little about this stuff called "In Good Company" all the corporate 'buy everything' BS is just getting old and obviously we need some new methods perhaps because things are getting unbalanced.

#4 Larry Probst -

Quote:
"At the end of the day its who can build the highest quality products. There's plenty of room for other third party companies - and console first-party companies - to do that. Just because EA Sports and ESPN are partnering I don't think people are going to run for the hills and not compete with us."

OK, so they have the ESPN and NFL licenses ... exclusively!!! Then he's pompus enough to say something like that ... as if he'd invest money developing and marketing a football title without any pro players or teams or even THE sports networks backing (which alone wouldn't do much)...

#5 College football games are popular despite the fact that none of the players are modelled after real world players. I have a hunch that if the developers give the gamers enough cool features, they'll be able to get over the lack of real football players.

Because of these exclusive agreements, we may see a whole new breed of football games which are much more unique and creative than the usual faire. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a football game set in the past, before players wore so much protective gear. Maybe we'll see a football game set in the distant future where each player rides around in a giant mech. It's even possible that something like the "Mutant League" series will emerge.

I might be being optimistic, but I could see this blowing up in EA's face. All they are really doing is forcing the competition to be more creative.

#6 I hope it does.

#7 I'd love to see Mutant League come back ... unfortunately that was one of their games ...

#8 @ Jeremy


You should have delivered the full quote instead of just that part. This is the real clincher to how the company thinks and how you can expect them to conduct themselves in the future....

Quote:
"I think there's plenty of room for competition," said Probst.

Can anyone tell me how much room for competition there is in the pro football gaming buisness? From my POV there is exactly 0.0% extra room left for a competitor for at least the next 5 years and the morons at ESPN accepted a contract which guarantees that ESPN will not be back to compete with EA for at least 15 years. In 5 years EA's grip on the franchise will be so tight that nobody will be able to step up to the plate and offer the NFL anything better than EA offers them.


EA had been trying to partner with ESPN for a while, and ESPN chose not to deal with them. So EA flat out forced ESPN out of the Football game business which pretty much forced them into a partnership with EA to make up the substantial loss of not being able to compete with them anymore. This quote from ESPN says it all....

Quote:
"We were very happy with our relations with Sega," said Skipper. "However, if you think about who you want to be working with for the long term ... EA is the natural choice for us to be associated with."

That's the nicest way I have ever heard anyone say "EA slapped us around, bent us over, and made us love it".

#9 Well, good luck to em.

Thing is guys, you CANT BLAME EA for doing all this. Its the buying public who is stupid enough to buy the licensed games and drek thats being pumped out.

The fact is, people WANT licensed games. Madden was like #3 game for sales in the US over christmas. Only GTA:SA and one other game was coming close.

The problem here isnt that EA are owning the rights to all these things, but rather than the whole industry is trying to follow suit and do EXACTLY the same thing. Theyre seeing the huge pot of cash EA have got and saying "Ive got to get me some of that".

Any other publisher would do these kind of deals in a picosecond given the cash flow.

The enemy is our own stupidity. We all prefer "branded" and "licensed" to "original" and "inventive".

Now, outside of the commercial nightmare, what is it like for indie games? I'd love to see indie development figures :)

#10 I believe the guys who did A Tale in the Desert just signed a deal with Orson Scott Card... there's indie deal-making for ya :)

Gonzo nailed it. People want novelty, but they want to experience it from within their comfort zone of familiar settings and characters. That's why licensed properties work. That's why you slap "Star Wars" on anything and it sells. That's why people are only interested in sports games with familiar athletes.

Now here's a concept that might work for indies. Maybe. Maybe maybe.

Create a "generic" basketball game. $19.95. Nobody's going to want to play it, right? Now contact a bunch of local high schools. Create free, downloadable rosters of their players. Get their stats. Shoot, get permission and photos and add their faces. Create these as free downloadable packs. Advertise the game in your local area. Advertise your willingness to add more packs to your website. Advertise your willingness to let OTHER people put up packs for their high school.

It would be a heck of a lot of work, but do you think you might get enough sales from high school students (or parents of high school students!) to make it viable?

Think outside the box. Address the niche that the giants like EA can't reach into.

#11 Along similar lines of thinking. What if i created a football game which allowed players to customize it and they create a bunch of real NFL teams. Am i as the game developer responsible for what people that have bought the game do? Will/can the NFL come after individuals for replicating real teams? It doesn't seem to fall into "fair use", so i suspect it would be shut down rather quickly.

Still i could create rosters and teams using city names, use player numbers without names, and even use use similar generic faces/uniforms. Totally avoiding the actually copyrighted material (NFL logo, player names and likeness, team names and uniforms, etc). I believe some of the original EA Sports games did just that.

#12 It's ridiculous ... yes you might be able to think outside the box and have some success but let's face it ... NFL is the box for football basically. Could you have some success with a generic football game ... yeah probably some success ... that's it. It wouldn't be anything close to competition.

#13 @Tom that's exactly what your going to see. Generic names, on generic faces, in real cities, with generic teams. I'm sure there will still be a "create a player/team" option so if you want to go through all the trouble you could probably re-create the whole NFL. But who wants to do all that.

Drew Hitchcock: "College football games are popular despite the fact that none of the players are modelled after real world players. I have a hunch that if the developers give the gamers enough cool features, they'll be able to get over the lack of real football players."

But the only reason people buy the generic college games is because that's all there is. Their all generic. It's against league rules to have player names for any college football team so if you like college football, they are all even in that aspect. Now let one company get past that rule and I'm sure over the years you will see sales start to lean more and more in their favor. If marketed right and made their biggest selling point I'm sure you will see a huge boost in sales over the competition. Expect future EA adds to bombard us with things like "THE ONLY NFL, ESPN EXPERIANCE OUT THERE!!!" or "REAL PLAY BY PLAY COMMENTARY FROM REAL ESPN BROADCASTERS CHRIS BERMAN AND WHATS HIS FACE FOR THE ONLY AUTHENTIC NFL GAME ON THE MARKET!!!" Oh their getting paid when the game is released believe me. Not too many people know or even care about the polatics behind the game. All they know is that this game is "real" and that other one isn't.

Drew I do agree with your second sentence I quoted to some extent. EA will always be on top but there are some innovative ways that other football games can still be successfull, until EA tries to take that away as well or just plain steal it. I'll post my "game idea" in the appropriate forum later. Everybody stop by and tell me what you think.
-Ajari-

Edit @Jeremy: I agree with you 100%.

#14 @Ajari - Well no one person would create all the major league teams themselves, but i do see people creating their favorite teams or players. They share that with other people they play with via their website. Eventually someone packages up all the different teams and polishes all up into one package and distributes that. Once people get into the groove of things you may see organized teams keeping stats/trades up to date on a daily basis. This is leveraging the passion of the community to it's fullest which I'd like to do. Still there are potential issues:

Am i as a developer opening myself up to trouble if i allow people to easily create custom content that could potentially violate copyrights? I guess not thinking of other game mods in the past... but again this is the NFL/MLB/NHL/NBA we're talking about.

Could I have a "auto download" feature when you don't have the same team packs as your opponent in a multiplayer game without being implicated in sharing illegal files?

Do I have to censor talk in community areas to keep people from trading these potentially copyright violating files?

There are plenty of sticky issues like this to consider.

#15

Quote:Thing is guys, you CANT BLAME EA for doing all this.

Oh yes we can, the underlying arguement and facts in this case are that EA is using pure musclepower to sell games instead of making a quality game that was better than the rest. ESPN's success in cutting deep into EA's market PROVED that people wanted a quality game MORE than they wanted John Madden's name attached to it. EA recognized that fact and rather than risk any more losses to their share the first thing they did was to figure out a way to eliminate any competition to their product instead of trying to improve the quality of their product. It speaks HUGE volumes about their commitment to make GOOD games. And if you are having trouble understanding what they are saying, loosely translated they are telling us "The quality we give you is way more than we think you deserve so STFU and quit complaining, this is our market we will not tolerate you purchasing someone else's product". And now that the have succeeded in eliminating the competition completely, they not only do not have to worry about improving the quality, but they no longer even have to maintain the sub-standard quality they currently produce. There is no reason to believe that the games will get any better and every reason to believe they are going to get worse. That is the entire point to competition, more choices means higher quality and fair pricing to the consumer.

Quote:Its the buying public who is stupid enough to buy the licensed games and drek thats being pumped out.

I fail to see where buying a licensed game is any different than buying an unlicensed game, but buying a crappy game is definately the fault of the person that shelled out the bucks before sampling the product.

Quote:The fact is, people WANT licensed games.

Nobody "wants" a licensed game, they just want a game for whatever reason suits their taste. For example, I would never buy a baseball game from anyone licensed or not, crappy or not, revolutionary or rehashed old school, simply because I do not like baseball games or even baseball itself for that matter. But I would buy a Football game in a heartbeat because I like football, and I like football games. I do not "want" or even "need" a licensed football game, but I do "want" a football game that is built around the historical performance of the league as games like Madden and ESPN have traditionally done because it's fun to be Emmit Smith and run through defenses for a 40 yard touchdown, or to be Michael Vick and frustrate your opponant by being able to pass well, hand off for a run, or just plain run period. Knowing which teams handle which formations or types of plays better gives you a chance to use your own ideas and skills in calling plays to manage your teams performance for better or worse. Not having teams and players represented with some type of historical accuracy and personal stats makes all of those concepts useless and pretty well takes away all of the very reasons most of us purchase those football games in the first place.

I personally have zero interest in playing any football game that is not based on statistical performance and the vast majority of Madden and ESPN purchasers would most likely tell you the exact same thing. So for the next 5 years, I'm pretty well stuck with playing the football games I currently own, or nothing at all because I gave up buying EA's games off the shelf almost a year ago due to being sick of the crappy quality of their products. If I really want to play a game that they have released(LOTR for example), I always rent it to prevent EA and the company that used them from seeing any of my $$$. And renting a football game is pretty pointless for me due to my playing habits. So not even Blockbuster is going to be able to get my $$$ on EA's football.

#16

Quote:The problem here isnt that EA are owning the rights to all these things

That's exactly the problem here, EA's lack of commitment to quality, and full dedication to market dominance via elimination of all competitors. This discussion wouldn't even be taking place at all if these things had happened with a reputable company that had a history of producing high quality games. EA has a history of producing mediocre to crappy games and using financial musclepower to purchase the companies that do make good games and then destroying those companies via forcing them to make games the EA way or not at all.

Out of over 19,000 people who participated in an online poll, only 16% of them think EA's recent deals will make the games better, 34% aren't sure how they feel about it, and the remaining 50% flat out do not like it with 84% of that group choosing "EA is the devil, and ESPN just sold their soul" for their response. So clearly 84% of the gamers who participated in the poll do not view this deal as being of any real value to the gaming industry or gamers themselves, and 60% of them think it's actually going to make things worse.

Quote:but rather than the whole industry is trying to follow suit and do EXACTLY the same thing.

There is no basis of fact to support this statement at all. These deals are very critical to the market for very specific reasons. As an example lets use fight simulation games to compare why these deals are so unique and so important and why your statement is logically flawed. For the last 20 years Microsoft's Flight Simulator has been the best selling flight sim on the market. For the last 20 years they have had competition and even today they have more competition than they have ever had and still their game is ranked #1 in sales, and so far every review and flight sim shootout or comparison I have read ranks MS's Flight Sim as the best in overall quality, performance, and price. And in every one of these 20 years there has never been a single licensing deal that gave Microsoft any kind of edge or exclusive that nobody else can use in their game. There is nothing preventing me, you, or anyone else from going directly head to head with MS if we choose to do so. Microsoft has dominated the market for two decades by consistantly releasing the highest quality flight sim you can get, not by eliminating all other flight sims from the market. And there is definately no shortage of people trying to make a better sim.


Now contrast this with EA having exclusive rights to all NFL trademarked property which includes not only the worldwide recognized NFL logo, but the teams, the players, the stadiums, and all NFL licensed media as well. How can you, me, or even Microsoft begin to compete with that? ESPN was already well on their way to being a formidable player and was definately competing with them in what many would say was at that point at time a dead even race, and look at where ESPN is now. Sure, we can make a football game, but I wouldn't even buy my own game at this point so why would I expect anyone else to? A friend and I had actually mulled over and pondered the idea of making a football game for the last couple of years because we were tired of the continued loss of quality in the EA Madden series but had never really acted upon it because ESPN was up and coming with very satisfactory quality, now the decision has been made for us.

Even if we could make a football game a 1000 times better than any ever produced by EA it wouldn't make any difference. Even if the NFL wished that they could just hand us the rights to their name because they desperately wanted to be connected to such a fantastic game, it wouldn't make any difference, and even if EA's next release lowers the quality back down to where the 16 bit systems were years ago it wouldn't make any difference, EA has exclusive rights to what really makes a football game a football game and for the next 5 years nothing is going to change that.

#17 And now that the NFL, AFL, NASCAR, The PGA Tour, FIFA Soccer, and ESPN are EA's bitches under exclusive contracts, the rest of the leagues are about to crumble more like a house of cards than dominos falling one after the other. Their choices are limited so much now that they are pretty well just waiting to see what EA is going to offer them before they sign up. EA cannot secure a monopoly in First Person Shooters, EA cannot secure a monopoly in flight sims, puzzle games, RPG's, MMORPG's, racing games, shooters, RTS's, or plenty of other genre's, but they very well can and in some cases already have secured a monopoly in sports by leveraging the assets and legal capacities of the leagues which are so highly critical to making a successful sports simulation. They don't want to make better games and they don't want to compete, they want to make sure their game is the only one you can buy.

Quote:Any other publisher would do these kind of deals in a picosecond given the cash flow.

While this may be 100% correct I can tell you that off the top of my head there is no other company that I fear more than EA for having this kind of power. I would rather see Microsoft(yes as hated as they are) in this exact position because at least they built their incredible reputation and impressive library of top selling hits completely on quality and customer loyalty alone. Despite leveraging their OS to monopolize the desktop, browser, and media market on PC's they have always competed on a fair playing field and their past history tends to show that they are more commited to making the highest quality video games than they are a high quality operating system to run them on, lol.

#18

Quote:
Oh yes we can, the underlying arguement and facts in this case are that EA is using pure musclepower to sell games instead of making a quality game that was better than the rest.

Yep, there it is exactly. They are using financial overkill instead of competing properly. Perhaps we should return to full contact life ... EA would get their rears kicked ... oh yeah that's right we have laws against that because it's not fair and nice ...

#19 Gonzo you son of a bitch where were you with all this when I was arguing with Ben back in the other thread!? :p Nah seriously though everything you said makes perfect sense and I feel is the dead truth. I can tell this whole thing pains you just as much as it pains me.
-Ajari-

#20 If you want Ajari, I'll come over here.