F#$k!!! all these greedy a$$holes are gonna mess up my sports videogames! it wasn't until visual concepts came out that ea really went back to improving their games. now with each of them owning exclusives in different sports where will the competiton be? i can see alot of crap coming out, ea sure did it for years. as for the baseball game i liked ea's mvp baseball by far the best the last 2 years, hopefully this deal doesn't go down.
meh, MLB games isnt as big as NBA and NFL games. As long as Sega can still make my NBA games, I'll be happy.
Eventually, someone in China will build an NBA, NFL, NHL game without the license, and all of this will fall apart. DD
Gamespot had an interview with EA's marketing head, Frank Gibeau. Here. Some things about what they want to use the ESPN deal for:
What would that do to piracy websites? Golly, I'd sure hate to be a Chinese website moderator with a bunch of avid American game fans invading my forums! Thankfully that idea is so far-fetched that I can sleep peacefully. useful edit: As a developer, DD, don't you foresee these companies leaving backdoor/loopholes open for users to edit the logos and names of players or teams? It happens in OOTP, etc. Could these license-holding companies litigate against other developers for such backdoors? It may seem crazy or out of the realm of reality, but what else is possible given what's going on lately with leagues and licenses?
You mean engineer a game from the ground up that's of comparable quality to an EA/VC product? Perhaps if there were a high quality, yet generic, licenseless game they could do something like that, but presumably the US modding community would take care of that anyway. I'm no software designer, but that's a slightly more complicated (and low margin) endeavor than making a t-shirt with a "Prada" tag on it or ripping a DVD.
If that were to happen, I guess we'd see no more GTA, or at least GTA as we know it. Although I guess the GTA guys would probably just leave and form their own company, in which case the largest money maker for Take-Two would be gone. Although maybe Disney will still allow for games like GTA, Max Payne, Manhunt, etc to go on under their management unphased. I don't know what all Disney owns though, so I could be wrong if they do in fact have some provactive material under their name. I just find it hard to picture the next GTA startup screen having Disney at the bottom.
I fail to see why everyone thinks all of this is bad, particulary the NFL/ESPN with EA deal. The bottom line is these companies still have to make the game good enough for consumers to buy it. If they slack off and don't improve the game, sales will drop and they won't profit from spending all this money on exclusive licenses. This gives these developers a chance to go to a whole new level. Whether or not they will take advantage of that remains to be seen...but I don't think sports games will downgrade from it.
What really sucks is, in my opinion, EA has the best baseball game, while Visual Concepts has the best football game.
Umm...the NFL put their license out for sale. What did you expect EA to do, drop dead and lose their biggest franchise? It's been in the press that the NFL started negotiations with producers, not the other way around. At least give the proper flame to where it's due.
exactly...alot of times companies would add new features on the games just to top the competitor's products (ie. EA adding the All-Star, Dunk, Rookie game feature on NBA Live '05)
Umm...this has been discussed ad nauseum in an earlier thread from around the time that news first broke. EA had been pressuring all the major sports to give them an exclusive licenses for the past year, if not longer, well in advance of the NFL's auction. So the proper flame was due to them. EDIT: The thread to which I was referring: http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=88245&perpage=30&pagenumber=2 EDITEDIT: Hey, wait a second, you actually put this same post in that thread, months ago. It looks like you missed something.
Although, to be fair, we also pointed out in that thread that it was as much the NFL's part for putting the auction up in the first place. And that the League may have made that decision because SEGA had started bargain pricing their brand name. I know you were going with the 'well EA still did some strongarming' theory in that thread, too, but I don't know how much weight that carries. Though you also said in the thread that Take Two/Sega had no chance at doing the same thing...and now it appears they maybe about to do just that with MLB. It sucks, for the most part, yes. But I don't think it's fair to put the blame (ie, "Thanks for starting this, EA") squarely on their shoulders.
