The Two Party License System
Last night, tens of thousands of gamers lined up outside Bestbuy’s, Gamestop’s and Walmart’s at midnight, in order to get their copy of Madden 2014, the 25th anniversary edition of the game. The normal gamer ponied up 59.99 plus taxes to play the crown jewel of the American sports video game industry, while others paid upwards of $100 for special edition versions of the game. In the coming weeks, the game will be reviewed, roster updates will be made and gamers trying to build their ‘ultimate team’ will spend potentially hundreds of thousands collectively.
As we continue to plod along in the fourth decade of sports video games, it is becoming more and more obvious that we have moved into a two-party system: EA Sports and 2K Games. While the occasional ‘third-party’ developer will release a game that peaks users interests, the best games and the plethora of games are being released by these behemoths.
The factor driving the two-party system is the licensing policies of the four major sports leagues. The NFL after 2005, decided to grant EA an exclusive license for Madden, meaning that its players, teams, and materials can only be featured in this game effectively ending 2K’s ability to continue its NFL 2K series. MLB has a split license giving Sony Entertainment a license to make MLB: The Show on its PlayStation console, but also granting 2K a license for Xbox 360. Slumping sales of the NHL 2K series, led to Take-Two, 2K’s parent company to cancel the game, forcing Gary Bettman to ‘grant’ EA the official hockey license. The NBA is the only major sport, which grants two licenses, one to EA and one to 2K.
EA continues to publish its NCAA Football line of games, but how long that is going to continue in the face of litigation and the NCAA and several schools pulling their licensing agreements for the 2015 version of the games is currently up for debate. EA and 2K have stopped publishing all other NCAA games, including basketball and baseball.
What users need to know is that while the quality of games is likely to improve in the next generation of consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, the number of titles may shrink even more. The main reason for this is it’s not going to be very easy to build a game for either of the next generation consoles.
Console Generation Eight
The release of the Xbox One and the PS4 are considered the eighth round of console releases. Both products while increasing gaming capabilities are also becoming more entertainment based consoles. Sony and Microsoft are both trying to build the concept that the console is an extension of your television, where you can watch movies, TV, and live events. Connectivity to the Internet is a major part of the development.
“They are setting themselves to be conveyers of entertainment, whether that is a video game or a streaming movie or something else, who knows what these channels will ultimately deliver,” Owen Good, better known in many circles as ‘Stick Jockey,’ of Kotaku.com, one of the best blogs for everything video games, exclaimed.
What the new systems will bring sports video games is a more polished visual.
“I am excited about the horsepower that these systems have, certainly the graphics is something that people can point out and say hey this is a new system this looks great,” Matt Kato, Senior Editor at Game Informer explained.
“(However), I am more interested in what these systems can do for the artificial intelligence of these games.”
Both the Xbox One and PS4 are being rolled out with an emphasis on boosted memory, RAM and computing power, which should be a considerable upgrade over its predecessors.
“Having played and reviewed games on the current systems for many years there seem to be gaps where they are lacking. Horsepower in the new systems will have the ability to rectify many of these issues,” Kato stated.
The new gaming consoles are being rolled out with introductory sports titles. While both, EA and 2K Sports declined comment on their first titles on the new systems, games that are listed are Madden, FIFA, and both companies’ basketball games. The rollout will boost sales of the products overall.
“The more casual gamer will pick-up a Madden rather than trying to pick up a new intellectual property, like a third person action hero,” said Kato. “Sports in the beginning of the next console cycle will definitely be used as bread and butter titles to put out there.”
“These are just the money makers. These are the games that you want to launch to sell your brand, no coincidence that they aren’t doing that with NHL for instance. It’s not worth the return.”
But the new console creations create a secondary issue for the markets biggest creators: cost. Having to take the materials they use on the previous platforms and develop them to meet the technical specifications of the new console generation is both a painstaking and costly endeavor.
“EA and 2K, they have the money to invest in tech many years out before this new generation is going to start, so for them, its an expensive proposition that they are going to reap the benefits from,” Kato said of its top two developers. “Unfortunately it’s cost prohibitive to enter into (for other developers), because of the uncertainty of it, with the expenses right off the bat and you’re not going to get the returns back because after three or four months, by March, new purchases begin to dry up. EA and 2K are able to spend the money and leverage some of the tech…and make their money back two-three years down the line.”
“It’s more expensive on the current console generation than it was eight years ago for the Xbox/PlayStation 2,” Good stated, he believes that the this next generation will be even more costly as the processing gets even more complicated.
Gamers are just going to have to live with the fact that fewer games are being rolled out, but they may be of a higher quality. Interaction with the Internet and Online-Gaming has become such a large portion of the industry, that the decrease in titles may just be the status quo.
A Swing and Miss
If you read any sports video game blog, eventually the issue of MVP Baseball will come up. MVP was a title series owned and operated by EA Sports, which replaced the Triple Play series, and produced four games from 2003-2007. MVP Baseball 2005 is often placed in the pantheon of sports video games and has appeared in numerous top ten sports video game lists on the Internet. But after the 2005 game, MLB decided to grant 2K Games an exclusive license. MVP became a game featuring NCAA teams for 2006 and 2007 before being discontinued due to slumping sales.
To summarize the general thoughts, the association between MLB and 2K Sports has been an unmitigated disaster and failure.
“Its first version on the Xbox 360 had a game breaking mode, it wouldn’t let you out of the third inning. MLB 2K9, was a product that was hurried out the door when Take-Two, moved the project from one development studio to another, essentially closing the first one, and it was one of the worst licensed sports video games ever made, certainly in recent memory, and I think MLB is very aware of that,” Good opinioned.
In 2012, when MLB’s deal with 2K Games was up, MLB had no choice but to resign with 2K, allowing the developer to put out a below par product, but was profitable.
“MLB couldn’t take the ignominy of not appearing on North America’s dominant console, and just taking a year off from that. 2K wasn’t going to put a lot of money into it,” said Good.
“But MLB also knows that EA Sports has no interest in this license,” Good continued.
“It’s not one that has done very well,” Kato reiterated. “I know they were at a crossroads this last year, where it was kind of up in the air, they weren’t sure they were going to return it, there were some words from the MLB, kind of stating the same thing, and the partnership hasn’t really been where they have wanted it.”
But what both Kato and Good expressed is that the granting of an exclusive license can often hurt the league giving the license. A single party developer often causes any of its competition to stop producing any of the mechanics needed for a future title.
“I don’t know how the industry pulls out of it, I have theorized that leagues who have signed exclusive licenses will have a very hard time finding another partner (at the end of the license contract)…because you can’t just spin up a product which meets the public’s demand in a year like you could eight years ago,” Good stated.
The lead-time needed for games on the current console generation creates issues with changing developers, and the next generation console will continue to create more problems.
“I have no clue who would be building an MLB game from scratch for Xbox One right now,” said Good. “It’s conceivable, but I don’t know who it would be.”
When it comes to baseball if you want to play you may be forced to buy a PS4, and pick up Sony’s MLB: The Show, the critically acclaimed series that has received solid rankings across the board the last several years. Not an ideal situation when Xbox One is expected to outpace its rival again.
The Roster Update Idea
Over the last several years, a hot topic on the sports video game blogs is about games being released every other-year with major roster updates and tweaks during the year in between. A consumer friendly concept but one that apparently is not going to happen any time soon.
“It is a hopelessly naive idea,” Good bellowed. “These games annual release is mandated by the people who are doing the licensing, the NFL, the NBA want a new game out every year, because it makes them more money…no one can articulate to me how it makes the publisher money.”
“From what I know from the industry, I don’t think we are going to see the yearly game go away anytime soon,” expressed Kato. “I think they have looked into it and thought long and hard about it, but I think they know where their money is coming in, and at the moment they are selling enough $59.99 games, they continue to rely on that money.”
The advent of a more Internet connected system could possibly lead to these types of changes, something promised by Microsoft and Sony in the next-gen console. Downloading of games directly to the console began over the last several years and might be one of the first steps to a change in the way consumers purchase games. The circumventing of GameStop, Bestbuy and Walmart, is already occurring for many gamers, but could it happen user wide?
“It is going to take something extremely creative,” said Good. “It’s going to take going to a full digital subscription model, which is something that the next generation consoles might introduce…but as long as we are disc based, it’s not going to happen.”
FIFA: The Global Dominator
What FIFA does for EA Sports is it widens the playing field considerably on global sales. FIFA easily beat all other sports video games in global sales last year and will continue to do so as more people gain access to video game systems worldwide. FIFA World, a free to play PC product has been launched in Russia and China to expand the game even further. With more countries coming online and being added in the game, FIFA is a sure bet to continue to dominate the sales charts. What we often forget is that during the last console generation, it wasn’t even the top-selling game in the sector.
“They have capitalized on the plateauing of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, which on PS2 was the dominant soccer game to play in the last generation. They have caught up on a lot of ground. I expect it to be a polished product in terms of game play and modes.”
FIFA, is such an important product for EA Sports, that even with the creation of a new engine for player physics, they released the title on both Xbox 360 and PS3 but will roll out the next generation FIFA as well. In a World Cup year it is bound to be a large sales year and the average consumer is most likely to going to be seeing a lot of advertisements for FIFA 2014.
Madden, a beacon of American sports?
After 25 years, it is safe to say that the Madden NFL series is by far the most popular American sports video game franchise. This doesn’t mean the series is exempt from criticism; it may actually garner more meta-criticism. Madden users over the years have called for changes, an expansion of the career mode and have asked EA to make the game even more like the NFL.
“Madden is a tall tree that catches a lot of limbs because it’s the NFL and EA Sports,” Good said.
“I think it gets a fair shake in evaluations because there is nothing to compare it to. They have the exclusive license, so there is no competition and there is this knee jerk idea that no competition doesn’t make everything better, and yes NFL 2K5 was a great game, but I think there are a lot of things that madden does well that if there had been a competitor, that we could judge them more soundly, and we could appreciate things like game-flow a little bit more, or the presentation quality a little bit more,” continued Good.
Last year Madden introduced a new physics engine, which was supposed to make players more realistic. With new systems coming online, Madden had to rebuild the engine once again. Whichever engine exists on the next generation consoles, Kato believes it will be of a high quality.
“I think they are inching along a little bit, there have definitely been improvements in their physics engine. From what I have seen so far it’s definitely getting better. Having said that, the next gen version of Madden which is also being released this year is using a different engine.”
Kato believes that Madden can still be built into the ultimate game.
“A new owner’s mode has been added, but my hesitation is that while they have added things on over the last several years, I still don’t think they have put out a complete product with an amalgamation of all those features, I don’t think they have come out and supersized them in the definitive game which makes you say ‘this is what all this progress has been leading towards.’ So while they have some pieces in place, its how they bring them all together that is going to be interesting and we just won’t know until we see the final product.”
The big question is will the new systems allow for the Madden designers to introduce every element that makes the NFL such a great viewing product. Will the additions coupled with the new physics engine allow for the game to meet the high demands of users? America’s largest, most selling game surely has been a positive product for all, as within any console generation change, it should be interesting to see how the product evolves.
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads
The American sports video game market surely has challenges in front of it. With three of the major sports granting complete or pseudo exclusive licenses, the number of titles seems to have stabilized at a low number.
One of the major growth industries for both EA and 2K is fighting. EA owns the license to UFC, and is working to make this years title even more realistic, by adding body movement elements. EA has not announced the continuation of its “Fight Night” series, so with additions come subtractions as well. 2K is getting into the wrestling business after purchasing the license owned by THQ, who recently went into bankruptcy. 2K is already throwing its weight around, adding more than 30 classic wrestlers to the WWE 2014 title. Many are predicting it will be the biggest title ever for a wrestling title.
The new console systems are going to maximize themselves on digitally downloaded content. While in 2005 many users plugged in their Ethernet cords, it has been suggested that many users still do not regularly use the online part of their system. Xbox One and PS4 are selling themselves as systems, which are going to maximize your TV viewing and game play experience through the Internet. So that makes us ask the question, are we that far from video games being available in a purely downloadable format?
Sports video games are always striving to mirror the real life sport they are portraying. Are we going to see a picture and picture function, so the user can both watch the game on live TV and play that year’s version of the game at the same time? What other innovations are coming? Both very interesting questions for sports video game industry.
The license system is causing issues, no matter how much the industry is trying to fight that notion. As both Good and Kato discussed, we are past the point of another company trying to build a game from scratch over the course of a year. The gaming systems and complexity needed to do so make it impossible. Consumer choice has been destroyed by certain leagues decisions to make their sport a one-game league.
Is that evidence of a maturing industry, or is it the last gasp of an industry struggling to deal with rising costs and declining sales? The answer to that question will be determined by the number of titles available at your local GameStop or what you can download onto your 8th generation console system.
Note: Both Electronic Arts Sports and 2K Games declined comment on this story. All discussions were held prior to other reviews.