Sometimes I hate being right. The NFL announced a bunch of partnerships this week, including extending its exclusive deal with EA through 2030. It's almost impossible to find a video game fan who will defend this deal, but neither the NFL nor EA cares whether we enjoy the product. We (and I'm including myself) continue handing them money every year. We're never going to stop while the NFL license is exclusive.
I am a willing participant in the content creator economy. And while I hate so much of what EA stands for, I am not about to leave the job where I get paid to play video games to say, go back to reporting about crime. I have a following who listens to my opinions on Madden, and I appreciate every last one of you. When it comes to Madden NFL, I would compare us to crack addicts, but some of them actually stop using and go to rehab.
This is as good a place as any to mention that the NFL also announced it will continue working with Amazon, including football games on Amazon Prime on Black Friday.
That's the same Amazon that owns Twitch, and is always trying to find more ways to bring eyes to that part of its ecosystem. It's also the same platform that is bringing Madden: The Movie to our TVs , starring Nicolas Cage as John Madden.
This game was as unfair as when a young kid gets Madden NFL for Christmas and plays their first ultimate team game against someone who has spent $10,000 on their MUT squad.
By the way, EA is going private with a huge influx of fresh cash from Saudi Arabia. There's no way Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund makes that deal unless it is confident that one of the company's biggest franchises isn't going anywhere.
As I've mentioned, 2K did itself no favors with the failure of its mobile title, NFL Playmakers. That dismal effort sadly showed that even if the league wanted to take its business elsewhere, those dreams of NFL 2K rising from the ashes were never more than our best, hopeful wishes. They had as much chance of happening as a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl run.
There were no other serious competitors. Sony and Microsoft barely make first-party video games anymore. Madden makes them enough money with having to foot any of the cost of creating a game themselves. They're largely digital storefronts now. If a game such as Madden gets you into the store, they know you'll buy something else while you're there. It's the same reason Amazon was so eager to get the NFL.
Now when EA aced 2K out of the football sim business, even it didn't realize the effects. It isn't cheap to make football games, and without the guaranteed revenue of an NFL license publishers are mostly uninterested.
The NFL is one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, and Madden is a critical marketing tool for it. The league loves legacy brands such as Gatorade and Budweiser, and Madden is essentially an in-house legacy brand at this point.
I'd love to see this monopoly broken as much as anyone, but at this point it's hard to imagine how it ever happens.