When Madden NFL Killed NFL 2K | Hacker News Reader

When Madden NFL Killed NFL 2K

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58 pointsvezycash46 comments

The shock waves of this deal basically killed all competition in sport video games. When I was a kid there were usually 3 or 4 games in each of the big pro sports. Today there is really only one viable franchise per sport (even though I believe all the exclusive licenses have since expired). The market for these games is bigger than ever with EA bringing in almost $1 billion per year from their Madden and FIFA franchises. However the cost of licensing and the threat of another exclusivity bidding war means the barrier to entry and long term risk of creating a new franchise is sadly too high to get any serious competition.

Isn't Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer still kicking around? You're essentially right otherwise though.

Not for long: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/16/pes-2019-champions-leagu...

PES / WE has never had official licenses except for a few clubs here and there that change every season and no one cares because it's simply superior to FIFA in every other way. People have been playing this game for over two decades without official licenses. Losing the CL license will not affect the game much.

EDIT: Also, there are community patches with all the kits, at least for PS4 / PC.

Dying a slow death. Sports is all about the stories, the personalities, the names, the drama, the tribalism. If you can't license the big teams or big competitions and have to rename everything (which PES is famous for) you just can't compete with the same feeling. And game quality wise they don't stand out anymore like they did for a few years to compensate.

I used to play sports games 90% singleplayer or with friends in the same room. The fact you had PES and your friend had FIFA didn't matter much, even if one game sells 20% and the other 80% of marketshare, they can co-exist because when you play together, it's on one machine, the controls are just slightly different but they have quicksettings for those. Now that it's all gone online, network effects take over. If you want to multiplayer you both need the same game, and the dominant market share game will thrive while the rest basically offers singleplayer only + multiplayer mostly against a small community of mostly strangers. That's also partly why PES hasn't been doing very well the past few games I think.

Just wait till the each sport decides to move things in house. Subscription model with live updates. TV streaming of out of region games included as well.

> The shock waves of this deal basically killed all competition in sport video games

Have revenues gone up or down since EA's exclusive-licensing deal?

Pretty telling excerpt of the business BS going on from Wikipedia:

ESPN NFL 2K5 was the first in the 2K series priced at $19.99 the day it shipped, much lower than market leader Madden NFL at $49.99. This greatly reduced Madden sales that year; one EA Sports developer recalled that "[i]t scared the hell out of us".[1] EA reduced Madden NFL 2005's price to $29.95. In December 2004 EA Sports acquired an exclusive rights agreement with the NFL and NFLPA to be the sole creator of NFL video games.[2] The deal terminated 2K Sports production of any further NFL games. The ensuing season, Madden 2006, saw pricing returned to the $49.99 MSRP.

In December 2010, a U.S. district court judge certified a class action anti-trust lawsuit against Electronic Arts for anti-competitive practices to proceed.[3] Electronic Arts settled the class action suit in July 2012 for $27 million, and retained its exclusive NFL license.[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_NFL_2K5

I remember when this happened when I was just a kid of maybe 10 or 11. Around the time this was happening, you still had NFL blitz, street, fever, QB club, etc all duking it out for king of the sports games, especially.

It was a time before social media, so we only really heard rumors about what happened. We all began to hate EA, even back then. We knew it was about money. 2k6 wasnt perfect and it was clunky at times, but it was way more cost effective to play, considering how much you had to pay for a new roster every year

Madden is fascinating to me because despite widespread user dissatisfaction with the game year-in, year-out, its users treat it like a necessity. I guess that's a monopoly in action.

There is space for a competitive product, but it would need to be completely unlicensed. Without licensing, you'd need a simple way to customize rules, teams, players, etc. EAs NCAA series got around player issues in a similar way.

If that customization were fostered, you could have a football game that with a few clicks was a better Madden and/or NCAA series. You'd just need to trade your licensing budget for a legal one.

You might notice that the NCAA series doesn't exist anymore and that is partly because that plausible deniability of using the community to circumvent licensing rules can only go so far.

I think that's (a small) part of it. The surface reason is that EA did the same thing for a long time, creating players that looked like their real life counterparts with their real life attributes and real life numbers, etc.

That's what bit them. You're really going to be hamstrung fighting an open-world, modifiable game unless you're showing obvious negligence in policing it.

There would be numerous problems with 100% made up teams and players that would make it too risky for any big developer to attempt.

1. It would be hard to market without a single recognizable face or team.

2. It would be hostile to casual/novice users who couldn't play the game at its full potential out of the box.

3. It would be hard to create the online and esport modes that other sports games thrive on as you couldn't allow those custom rosters in competitive modes.

1. Absolutely. It would require some sort of viral approach. You won't win with traditional advertising.

2. Maybe. To be fair, I think the approach from point #1 would always come with an implicit :wink wink, nudge nudge:.

3. I'm not sure you couldn't allow it so much as you would be expected to respond to DMCA/etc in reasonable fashion.

That :wink wink, nudge nudge: was exactly what I was talking about in my first post that EA had to eventually give up on.

In order to have any competitive online mode, you need to have have player attributes that are in some way restricted so you can't just max out the attributes for your custom team. That would be in direct conflict with recreating teams realistically because real life teams can have huge disparities of talent between them.

And just to be clear, I am not saying that this can't be done. Just that the obstacles in the way make this such a risky undertaking that no established developer would take on a project like this.

> That :wink wink, nudge nudge: was exactly what I was talking about in my first post that EA had to eventually give up on.

It isn't, though. They had to give up because they did the job themselves, not because they had an open and accessible customization system. Had they never themselves created approximations of real players, it would have been a harder legal battle.

This is exactly what happens with football (US soccer).

FIFA has most of the licences while PES doesn't. PES is set up to be customised.

Football fans then fight about it online.

There is someone on Metacritic who pops up as practically the first review of FIFA every year and gives it 1 and says how terrible it is.

NFL 2K was the last big step change in football video games. You could put me on a desert island and I wouldn't miss Madden '18 one bit.

Actually I bought Madden '18 which is the first time I've bought a football game in a long time. Madden Ultimate Team is pushed so hard in that game. It's terrible. And people who dump a ton of money into it...you can't even take it into the next season with you.

One genre I'll really miss which will never come back are the NCAA Football and Basketball games. Understandably so.

NFL2K was easily the best football game. The controls were so much better than Madden. Something about Sega games that made them so easy to get into. I could never get into Madden.

On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked. So good..

NFL Blitz was also a fantastic game of that era.

It’s a shame that sports games all basically are strangled into a mold these days.

Yeah, totally agreed. Blitz was great because it didn’t try to be too realistic and had a lot of silly and ridiculous stuff, which made it a lot of fun. I don’t like or watch sports, but I did have fun playing Blitz on the N64 with my friends. Games like Madden take themselves too seriously and (IMO of course) only seem to be good for actual sports fans

Blitz knew exactly what it wanted to be: arcade football. A sort of spiritual successor to games like Mutant League.

Yeah NFL Blitz was awesome and still play it with my brother to this day.

I bought Blitz for the PC and remember playing it using my Microsoft Sidewinder joystick. Sometimes I'd invite my friend over and we'd play against each other on the same computer. He'd get the keyboard and I'd get the joystick.

There are some retro venues that still have it. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to find. I wonder if it can be played on Dolphin.

The PC version will only play on older systems, but it's seriously worth it. Even in just a XP VM. It's easily the best version of the game.

> On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked.

If you played as Bill Belichick, could you cheat? /s

As a Patriots hater, I appreciated this.

The VMU was novel and criminally underused. I think part of the problem was the novelty. No one knew what to do with it.

I remember Resident Evil displaying your health as a heartbeat thing. But that wasn't as useful since it required you to be constantly shifting your focus.

It also didn’t come with the Dreamcast, so no guarantee that a player would have one.

The whole aesthetic of 2K was great. They really made it look like an ESPN broadcast, complete with the announcers. I remember once my dad was confused as to why the Broncos were playing on a Wednesday night. Was legitimately surprised when I told him it was a game.

This reminds me, I actually still play Tecmo Super Bowl and actually prefer it over Madden. There is a large fan community and they put out a ROM patch with updated rosters every year [0]. The same for NHL Hockey '94 [1].

[0] http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/550-tecmo-super-bowl-2018-pr...

[1] http://www.nhl94.com

This can be broken, make a customizable game. Players can name their teams, name the players, name the city, load custom jerseys, load different faces/skin. Let the underground and players build their own player. Make the game player much better.

This could work provided there was a dedicated enough userbase in the early adopters who had the drive and dedication to create the current league. Then when/if the game gets popular enough, there should be enough people to make keeping up trivial.

You can fake the userbase. ;-)

I mean, you could do all the work yourself

This is exactly what's happening with Pro Evolution Soccer.

They tried. It doesn't work. People want the license.

Reading this thread is such a trip down nostalgia lane. NFL 2K (or maybe 2K1) was my first football game ever, and I have such good memories of playing it with my friends. Pity it had to die an early death, just like the Dreamcast.

I still miss Front Page Sports Football from the 90s. While we owned a couple of different versions, the early one that had the most play time for us was completely unlicensed, so we made up names for all of the teams. It was a really nice balance of sim, play designer, and arcade football. My brother and I each had a team and played through multiple seasons. If memory serves, I tanked the end of one season to ensure the #1 overall pick in the next draft. Unfortunately, with our setup only one person could play at a time so we had to sim any games our teams played each other (including a championship game or two).

I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. We both agreed that to date, it was the most fun either of us have had with a computer football game. Watching your fictional players develop,get hurt etc added an rpg-like element that was addictive. I am surprised and disappointed no one has made a comparable modern version.

I bet the next developer that makes a sports game with a Fire-Emblem spin (character relationship elements, individual personalities) will make a solid amount of money.

The source podcast ("Madden's Game, by 30 for 30) is itself very interesting for covering the development of the Madden games. Gets into great technical detail, such as how Madden refused to put his name on the game until developers could figure out how to make the game (in the 80s) have 11 vs. 11 players, as opposed to 7 vs. 7. Development stretched past 4 years and Madden's first game was predicted to be a financial failure.

https://30for30podcasts.com/episodes/maddens-game/

Yeah this ended any competition in NFL video games. Madden got a monopoly basically.

I am not American but I gained an appreciation for American Football when I started playing NFL 2k when it came out for the Dreamcast. I continued buying the game when it was out for the PS2 and was sad when that exclusive license thing was announced. I was looking forward to the day when the license expired but sadly that day never came.

One thing I also miss is the 2k College Hoops game. It was like playing NBA 2kx except that the rosters didn't matter because they were all randomly generated.

Last season should have been a good one for me-- I'm a Vikings fan.

But since the NFL became embroiled in politics, I quit watching-- and found I was fine without it. I look forward to more free time again this year.

I see where soccer (football to a lot of the world) is picking up a little more interest in the US. Maybe that'll be a better way to get my sporting fix.

:shakes fist vigorously:

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