Alternative tagline. EA sports, it's not the home of the beautiful game.
I have not cared about playing a simulation football game since Sensible Soccer on the Amiga (my friends did not invite me to play the PS1/PS2 efforts because I would figure out the hack button, as in injure players tackle rather than hack as we might know it around here, and use that constantly) and care even less about the sport itself but this is big news for both money and fate of a major game industry player -- annual sales are hard to gauge, even more so with mobile and them being the main example of loot crates these days, but the ending is being cast as a disagreement over price (EA apparently pays them 150 million USD per year, FIFA seeking to double that, so bound to be several times that which they get from it). No word if this is actually any kind of play from FIFA after EA controversies with loot crates, requirements from FIFA becoming untenable for EA (the agreement on what is acceptable/required/expected is likely to be hundreds of pages long), or just general money concerns but some comments back in February might hold some clue https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/24/22948808/ea-ceo-fifa-branding-andrew-wilson-comments .
Do also note EA did also notably lose Star Wars exclusivity (not rights in general, just exclusivity) and that is set to end in 2023 as well. Coincidence, Disney, or greater strategy shift within EA is unknown.
Anyway FIFA, the governing body of much of football (soccer for the Americans) and certainly most of what anybody would recognise, appears to have withdrawn the rights to their name from EA, who held the contract for over two decades. This does not include rights to the code or anything like that, just names, faces, likenesses, league names, possibly stadia, maybe commentators, sponsors... and as it stands they already have generic takes on things for those teams not bound up by FIFA and also not selling their rights.
Some sources.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/61406218
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/sports/soccer/fifa-ea-sports.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fifa-soccer-video-game-ea-sports-license/
No word as yet who might step up. There did used to be very strong competition from Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer (shortened to PES or Pro Evo, Winning Eleven in Japan) but they dropped that name this year, now known as eFootball, went awful freemium model and by all accounts have taken what was already a limping franchise and shot themselves in both knees. Not to mention Konami is probably not in position to really be dropping 300 million USD right now. How much the rights are worth to the game as a whole is unknown -- one of the major differences between PES and FIFA in days of old was the names you got access to and apparently they are quite desirable (alien concept to me really for anything but there is a reason EA is dealing in multi hundred million contracts and I am not). MS still has a bit in their war chest even after Activision, Sony would be a possibility (they have to know it is usually the last game on any of their systems), Embracer group maybe on the outside with some financing (they might also own some rights to the Championship Manager series following their purchase of several of Square Enix's western divisions https://gbatemp.net/threads/square-...ips-to-embracer-group-for-300-million.611677/ as it once was an Eidos property but don't quote me on that one, not to mention that is a management game rather than a simulation game even if lines got blurred towards the end). With some minor exceptions on mobile, and Inazuma Eleven which is a RPG, it has also been more than 20 years (way too long to have any useful code) since any non PES non FIFA simulation games (or even arcade takes) have made anything like a dent as far as I am aware, which also reduces the options for someone to buy a dev and buy the rights before combining the two and nobody involved, including FIFA themselves, is likely to take a 300 million hit for a year or three* to build an engine. Sega, once one of the other major competitors here, did do it as a mode in their Olympics game the other year ( Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - The Official Video Game) but I am assuming as a token search does not yield much on the quality of the matter then it too did nothing spectacular. Nintendo's Mario Strikers is probably way too far down the path of arcade to be worth considering in that whole thing.
*while EA sports annual releases wherein the names are changed and not much else would have FIFA as a poster child for the concept it does still represent a lot of work to catch up on.
No particular word from EA as to where they might go either, and while FIFA control a lot of rights there are still large teams outside their remit. I am sure some would be hoping for something like a return to FIFA street, though presumably going by another name, if nothing else.
I have not cared about playing a simulation football game since Sensible Soccer on the Amiga (my friends did not invite me to play the PS1/PS2 efforts because I would figure out the hack button, as in injure players tackle rather than hack as we might know it around here, and use that constantly) and care even less about the sport itself but this is big news for both money and fate of a major game industry player -- annual sales are hard to gauge, even more so with mobile and them being the main example of loot crates these days, but the ending is being cast as a disagreement over price (EA apparently pays them 150 million USD per year, FIFA seeking to double that, so bound to be several times that which they get from it). No word if this is actually any kind of play from FIFA after EA controversies with loot crates, requirements from FIFA becoming untenable for EA (the agreement on what is acceptable/required/expected is likely to be hundreds of pages long), or just general money concerns but some comments back in February might hold some clue https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/24/22948808/ea-ceo-fifa-branding-andrew-wilson-comments .
Do also note EA did also notably lose Star Wars exclusivity (not rights in general, just exclusivity) and that is set to end in 2023 as well. Coincidence, Disney, or greater strategy shift within EA is unknown.
Anyway FIFA, the governing body of much of football (soccer for the Americans) and certainly most of what anybody would recognise, appears to have withdrawn the rights to their name from EA, who held the contract for over two decades. This does not include rights to the code or anything like that, just names, faces, likenesses, league names, possibly stadia, maybe commentators, sponsors... and as it stands they already have generic takes on things for those teams not bound up by FIFA and also not selling their rights.
Some sources.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/61406218
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/sports/soccer/fifa-ea-sports.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fifa-soccer-video-game-ea-sports-license/
No word as yet who might step up. There did used to be very strong competition from Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer (shortened to PES or Pro Evo, Winning Eleven in Japan) but they dropped that name this year, now known as eFootball, went awful freemium model and by all accounts have taken what was already a limping franchise and shot themselves in both knees. Not to mention Konami is probably not in position to really be dropping 300 million USD right now. How much the rights are worth to the game as a whole is unknown -- one of the major differences between PES and FIFA in days of old was the names you got access to and apparently they are quite desirable (alien concept to me really for anything but there is a reason EA is dealing in multi hundred million contracts and I am not). MS still has a bit in their war chest even after Activision, Sony would be a possibility (they have to know it is usually the last game on any of their systems), Embracer group maybe on the outside with some financing (they might also own some rights to the Championship Manager series following their purchase of several of Square Enix's western divisions https://gbatemp.net/threads/square-...ips-to-embracer-group-for-300-million.611677/ as it once was an Eidos property but don't quote me on that one, not to mention that is a management game rather than a simulation game even if lines got blurred towards the end). With some minor exceptions on mobile, and Inazuma Eleven which is a RPG, it has also been more than 20 years (way too long to have any useful code) since any non PES non FIFA simulation games (or even arcade takes) have made anything like a dent as far as I am aware, which also reduces the options for someone to buy a dev and buy the rights before combining the two and nobody involved, including FIFA themselves, is likely to take a 300 million hit for a year or three* to build an engine. Sega, once one of the other major competitors here, did do it as a mode in their Olympics game the other year ( Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - The Official Video Game) but I am assuming as a token search does not yield much on the quality of the matter then it too did nothing spectacular. Nintendo's Mario Strikers is probably way too far down the path of arcade to be worth considering in that whole thing.
*while EA sports annual releases wherein the names are changed and not much else would have FIFA as a poster child for the concept it does still represent a lot of work to catch up on.
No particular word from EA as to where they might go either, and while FIFA control a lot of rights there are still large teams outside their remit. I am sure some would be hoping for something like a return to FIFA street, though presumably going by another name, if nothing else.
