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EA has signed an exclusive deal with the National Football League and the NFL players union. Its one of the few sports that EA didn’t have sown up to a certain degree and will certainly be a blow for rival companies with American Football games. The deal is for five years and should help to give a boost to EA’s Madden titles, which have lost market share this past year.
This only increases the grip that EA have on the sporting genre as a whole, with the draw of authentic player and teams names being a major plus for consumers. Before the deal, with competing companies offering this feature, the successful Madden series has seen a dent in its sales. However, it seems that discussions between EA and the NFL had be going for sometime, with the director of the NFL players association stating that ‘We started talking about this months before the ESPN product even hit the shelves’.
Reactions to this agreement hasn’t been as well received in all quarters with Take Two interactive issuing a statement that echo’s a lot of the feelings towards these ‘exclusive’ deals: “We believe that the decisions of the National Football League and Players Inc. to grant an exclusive license for video games do a tremendous disservice to the consumers and sports fans, whose funds ultimately support the NFL, by limiting their choices, curbing creativity and almost certainly leading to higher game prices.”
