Maybe Sega will rework their football game and well have XFL2K6 even though the XFL is long gone. :(
Whining campaign or not, LOTS of people and reviewers gave 2k5 the edge over Madden this year. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I might, I might not. I don’t buy it every year. I bought it this year because it was finally Live enabled.
As for sales #s, I’d be willing to bet that they go up. For every Xaroc, there are 2 or more Sega/ESPN customers who will buy Madden next year because they want the current rosters or a yearly update for their football jones.
I’ll be buying it. I was a Madden fan before this whole debacle, so to me it isn’t the knife to the heart it is to some NFL2kx fans. I’m disappointed that this might cause the Madden series to stagnate to an even greater extent, and it might lead to higher prices, but it’s not going to be a deal breaker for me unless it gets really out of hand.
But what choice do I have, really? Should I just not buy any football games for the next five years? Or buy one that has me playing as the New Jersey Nobodies? That’s not going to fly with me. You could argue (quite well I’d be willing to bet) that it’s foolish to buy yearly updates for sports franchises, but it’s worth it to me. For one, the people I play Madden leagues with are going to move on next year, so I’m forced to do so as well or be left behind. For two, having updated rosters and rankings does make a difference in the experience. I like taking my Vikings to the Super Bowl every year (God knows that’s the only way they’ll get there) and having teams and players behave the way they do in real life is important. I don’t want Barry Sanders running all over my defense, since he’s been out of the NFL for about 5 years now. I don’t want to have Warren Sapp crushing my quarterback every play since he’s washed up and has been sent to the old folks home in Oakland to play out his career.
Honestly, the whole situation makes me chuckle. Especially those of you who are calling for a boycott.
I voted No. But on rethinking it, I will buy a Madden title for the next-gen console if they get a new engine powering it. Otherwise, I probably won’t.
wzrd- What bubble? jpnard was acting like Sega was clearly superior and this underhanded trick was their only chance of competing. Madden is legitimately an excellent game.
I think the bubble is the one where you think that because you liked Madden more than ESPN, that that’s proof that ESPN wasn’t the superior product. Madden may be a legitimately excellent game, but so is ESPN.
I said Madden was better, but I didn’t say anything about Sega being a bad game. It’s just the guy with a grudge going around bitching about how EA always buys the license because they can’t make a better game is complete nonsense. This isn’t like the NHL series where EA’s offering sucks, Madden can and did compete with Sega. They didn’t need to buy the license so Sega would stop beating them with a superior product.
You have this wrong. Madden had to lower their prices to meet their sales expectations and avoid a loss. This was caused by the low price of ESPN. The buying of the NFL license was a way to get rid of a competition that was hurting EAs bottom-line on the MAdden franchise.
I’ll grant, however, that Madden is a good product. The point is that this is an underhanded business practice that sets up a monopoly style situation. The problem is that those of us who preferred ESPN’s style are now not going to have that option.
And you can keep using loaded language as a means to attack those of us who feel this way, but it isn’t fooling anyone.
No, they bought the license because Sega’s game is at least as good, maybe a bit better than theirs and the sales were slipping because of it, along with Sega’s nicely competitive price.
It’s the same thing, really. They just bought the exclusive license before Sega could damage their cash cow further. The ESPN name carries a lot more weight than the more generic NFL 2K3 did with gamers and it was clear that Sega could be closing the gap in sales.
–Dave
Sega was charging 40% as much as Madden. That’s a pretty huge difference. Sega was closing the gap in sales, but in revenue? In profit?
Anyway, obviously they bought the license to stop Sega(and Microsoft, and 989) from eating into their cash cow. But it wasn’t some stinking dirty underhanded trick to make the customer deal with a worse product as jpinard continues to whine about with his postly mentions of the Papyrus situation.
Well, that’s debatable. As you say, you like Madden more, but a lot of folks don’t. So for at least some of us it is a dirty, underhanded trick that makes the customer deal with a worse product.
I think jpiniard is also arguing that creating the monopoly on game rights this way will result in a lack of increased product quality from iteration to iteration. With no competition, EA no longer has to try as hard to make a better game. The same one with a new roster can sell just fine year after year.
I don’t think that’s so hard to understand or to see why someone would be unhappy about it…
–Dave
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A slightly worse product. EA can and did compete with Sega on game quality. This isn’t their way of giving up on ever beating Sega in that.
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The same one with a new roster has been selling fine year after year. This is true of every sports game. What was the last real innovation in football games? I’d say the removal of the passing windows in Madden '95 or so. Since then, every game has been a slightly more polished version of the last.
No one seems to consider that hurting EA’s bottom-line, or ESPN’s bottom-line, also hurts the NFL’s bottom-line. I suspect it would rather have $50 football games, not $20 ones.
Obviously that doesn’t matter to the NFL since they took a lump sum payment and not some percentage of each game sold. I don’t think the NFL cares either way.
–Dave
I think Dave’s right. The NFL gains either way; they just get the money right now in a lump sum. The real issue here is between the games. It doesn’t matter what the profits were for this year. The fact is that Sega got people to buy their game, and many people liked it. That’s going to hurt sales unless Madden does something, and they did. They want to END Sega’s football franchise so they don’t have to worry about it cutting into their profits ever again. That’s a monopoly, isn’t it?
The NFL would rather they sell the football games cheap obviously, because it extends their own market, but in terms of profits it doesn’t matter if they sell it for a dollar or a hundred times that. Even if EA torpedoes the market for some reason, leading them to not seek a renewal, I’m sure they could just give the license to someone else next time and have it spring back almost immediately.
What has me worried is that the door is now open for this deal to happen with all the major sports. What if Sega launches an offensive and signs an exclusive deal with the NBA and the MLBPA. Now while we would have a better game in Sega’s NBA series, but we would have to deal with a very poor baseball series. I personally don’t like this deal b/c as a consumer , I like choices and now it appears my ability to choose is severely limited. Next september, it’s madden or nothing. I guess it will be nothing, since I haven’t been a big fan of Madden since the PS1 days.
Oh, and what would’ve happened if 989 bought the NFL…yeah, I shuddered too.
That reminds me, I’ve been saying all along that the NFL went from 5 licensees to just two, but the other day while in BestBuy, I looked in the PS1 section and saw NFL GameDay 2005. Ew.
Can someone really “monopolize” a market by having exclusive license to a brand? For all the whining and bitching in this thread (which is perfectly understandable), EA did not buy the game of football, only use of the biggest brand. Anyone could bring along a better football game with made up stadium and team and player names and compete. They won’t sell as many the first year or two, sure. But in the long run, people will come to associate the new brand with the better game.