Huge changes could be coming to EA Sports games like Madden, NHL, and the FIFA series that will have a big impact on how we play sports games.
EA Sports might not release sports games every year, and that’s actually a good thing
This could be great.
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson floated the idea of that the company might not release yearly iterations of its sports games, instead opting to put out digital updates instead.
“There’s a world where it gets easier and easier to move that code around -- where we may not have to do an annual release,” Wilson told Bloomberg TV host Emily Chang on her show “Studio 1.0.” “We can really think about those games as a 365-day, live service.”
One of the biggest criticisms levied against the EA Sports games is that there’s very little change to their content year-to-year. Madden, for example, had felt the same way for years because the game ran on EA’s “Ignite” game engine from 2013-16, switching to Frostbite this year. Similarly, the game modes have largely remained the same, franchise options haven’t been updated, and changes have been so incremental that the title is often slammed for being little more than a roster update.
The idea of “games as service” isn’t a new one. It’s essentially the same model that League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch and, more recently, Player Unknown’s: Battlegrounds have been doing with mammoth success. They all lean on the concept of releasing one game, which operates as a living entity that evolves over time through updates and patches, without the need for iterative full-game purchases from the consumer. Instead they use in-game micro-transactions to fund updates to the game. League of Legends is now entering its eighth “season,” and even though it’s technically the same game that was released in late 2009, it is unrecognizable from the original product.
We’ve seen this kind of concept sneak into sports gaming with micro-transactions in Madden, NHL, and FIFA with their “Ultimate Team” mode, and the NBA 2K series has added its own in-game purchases.
Even if EA doesn’t fully adopt the “games as service” model, changing to a non-yearly model could potentially solve many of the games’ problems in one fell swoop — provided EA Sports executes on the idea properly. The big thing holding back advancement in sports games is the pressure put on developers to churn out a new game in a year. This leaves little room for planning and creativity, instead putting them under the gun to enact whatever small changes they can in order to hit hard deadlines placed on them by the start of annual sports seasons.
If these games simply moved to one release every three years, with yearly updates in between, it would allow developers time to really overhaul the game from the ground up and change the experience through new game engines, modes, and truly overhaul the graphics in a way they haven’t been able to in the past.
There might not be a new game for you to buy every year, and it could be the best thing to ever happen to sports gaming.
