EA Sports: Not in the Game

Even if you don’t play video games, chances are that you still know about a game franchise called “Madden” by EA Sports. This is a football simulation video game that has been a huge success over the years, allowing NFL fans to control their favorite quarterbacks. It has proven to be a great commercial success and more of these games are bound to keep coming in the future. Now, with every video game there has to be some kind of competition, right? Every shooting game competes with Call of Duty; every fighting game competes with Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter; every massive multiplayer online role playing game competes with World of Warcraft. Who competes with Madden? Sadly, no one.
Back when the game first hit the scene and as the years went on, technology for video games was getting better. The graphics were getting better and so was the game play. So it should go without saying that the Madden games were getting better and better every year. But then comes along other gaming companies like 2K Sports who also wanted to get in on the NFL licensing. While these two companies were competing to create the better NFL simulation game, EA Sports gradually began to feel threatened. Madden was making a realistic approach to the graphics and presentation. 2K Sports, on the other hand, was making the game play fun and exciting. Turns out, that’s exactly what the fans wanted. Good graphics are nice but game play will always win.
So how does EA Sports handle their competition? By making the graphics and game play superior to 2K Sports? Well, you would think, but they end up doing something that no one saw coming. EA Sports decided to buy out the NFL licensing so that only EA Sports could produce a football video game based off of the franchise. In other words, it would be illegal for 2K Sports to create another NFL-based game since EA Sports has those rights. Since then, Madden has simply been just an okay game. The series has definitely come a long way, but there is still a lot of work to be done. But EA Sports has ZERO competition for Madden, unless you count NCAA Football…which is EA Sports too! If Madden still had competitors, maybe for once they would make a good game. Not that Madden is a bad game by today’s standards, but I feel there’s a lack of heart and soul that other gaming companies put into their games.
To give hard proof that 2K was always better than EA, take a look at the NBA video games that they make. When 2K announced NBA 2K11 with Michael Jordan on the cover, EA Sports announced that their game would be called NBA Elite, which used to be called NBA Live. When 2K11 was finally released (before Elite), the game got rave reviews. It got countless 9s out of 10s from just about every gaming website and magazine. EA got intimidated and still had another month before NBA Elite was to be released. Turns out, EA decided to pull the plug on Elite, saying that it was going to be inferior to 2K11. Even if there wasn’t going to be competition, they said that the game would just be horrible on its own. EA needs to learn that they aren’t the only gaming company around and that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. They should compete with their games, not their money.
By Aaron Frias