SBJ Gaming: Relaunch of EA Sports College Football reflects generational change

The Ed O’Bannon name, image and likeness decision rocked sports video gaming.

EA Sports, with successful NCAA franchises in basketball and football, found itself losing two key properties -- not because of poor sales, but because of a court case that would usher in the NIL era in college sports.

Yet it’s the very thing that killed NCAA Football that has now helped EA Sports find a way to bring the game back, with EA Sports College Football debuting July 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. It first worked with licensing partners for colleges and conferences and then issued over 11,000 NIL offers to D-I players .

Where do you begin?

That’s the question that faced the designers and developers at EA Tiburon, the publisher’s Florida studio that produces Madden NFL and other sports games.

“Our players missed a whole generation of technology with the consoles,” said Daryl Holt, EA’s SVP and group GM for Tiburon Studios and American Football. He’s spent nearly 20 years working on Madden and college football games at the publisher, and he’s seen both the business models for games and sports change over that time. He first pitched the return of college football in 2019, and EA formally bought back the title in 2021.

“The way players engage, and the way fans engage with the sport, it's year-round, especially when we talk about football now,” Holt said. “It's not just during the season or the Super Bowl for the NFL or the College Football [Playoff] Championship. … So that aspect pulls in our engagement, pulls in fans and players in different ways.”

NCAA Football 2014 was at the forefront of EA’s live-service revolution, as it was the first (and only) edition in the series to have an Ultimate Team mode (in which players build teams of their own with star players, opening packs akin to trading cards to do so). The first CFP was still a year away. EA Sports hadn’t even adopted the Frostbite Engine from Battlefield developer DICE yet (Rory McIlroy PGA Tour for 2015 would be the first sports product to do so).

Holt knew the new EA team -- a group consisting of veterans who had worked on the original NCAA Football series, some Madden NFL developers, modders who kept NCAA Football 2014 going for years and others -- didn't want to just re-create what had been.

“When you move from where we were in 2013, when we last released that game, to where we are today, not only has the technology changed, not only has the player base changed, not only has the industry changed in terms of life service, capability, connectivity, year-round updates and aspects of the experience that continues to shift and change all of those things -- these influence the game that we made today,” said Holt.

One example of this is how people play Madden. The NFL season wrapped up months ago, but per Circana’s May games report , Madden NFL 24 remained one of the most played games, ranking seventh for monthly active users (MAUs) on PS5 and 10th on Xbox Series X/S.

“There's an element of Dynasty [mode]. That was the forefront, the focal point of this game,” Holt said. “As we were bringing it back, we've seen how the community engaged within NCAA 14 for multiple years after we stopped making the game. And Dynasty was the lifeblood of that. How do you continue to build a program? How do you recruit? How do you drive this passion that you have for a school, for taking a school that's smaller and bringing it all the way up to the national championship level? That is just something that is inherent in college football, and in our game that is very different [than Madden]. This is a key aspect of the college football game.”

The influence of the transfer portal

In previous Dynasty modes, NCAA players didn’t need to mess with anything more than recruiting. Now, you have to factor in NIL and the transfer portal, among other modern trappings of college football (pouring one out here for my beloved, decimated Pac-12). Remember: The transfer portal isn’t the same as the NFL’s free agency, so the team couldn’t just take that system from Madden and build on it.

“The transfer portal is something you can't ignore because it is part of the college football landscape, just like conference realignment, etc.,” said Holt. “It adds a layer of complexity, and also excitement to the overall recruiting, [especially] when you're sitting there thinking about creating a Dynasty and whether you're a tactician or a motivator or recruiter as a coach kind of archetype. You're still thinking about how do I build through high school ranks?”

Holt noted EA generated 3,500 new high school players for recruiting in Dynasty mode. The transfer portal is there to “round out” recruiting. But it also adds another gameplay layer. “How do you hold on to players? How do you motivate them? How do you keep them in your program? They’ll enter the transfer portal, and you sell them on the vision that you have,” Holt said. “And then, how do you take advantage of the portal to augment your team as you're building it out? So it's a really interesting component -- in the real world and also in the virtual world -- as we continue to compete and build programs.”

Dealing with NIL

NIL is another aspect of college football without a digital doppelgänger in Madden. And not only does it affect who is in the game, but it also factors into player movement in Dynasty mode. “NIL is a really exciting and interesting and frustrating part of this overall experience for us trying to re-create the real world,” Holt said.

Holt notes that when EA announced the return of the game, he thought the publisher could “help influence” the NIL conversation. “We did, to a certain extent, as a lot of things used our game as an example.” And having 14,000 athletes opt-in to the NIL program in College Football 25 is “really the largest [NIL program] of its kind,” added Holt. More than 10,000 players have already opted into the game, and EA Sports will pay them each $600 and a copy of the game.

In Dynasty mode, “We're going to handle NIL a certain way -- that it's changing and we don't know how it's all going to change.” The team settled on a model that will factor in what players want in NIL deals in terms of brand recognition, program ranking and national TV exposure when it comes to recruiting in Dynasty.

But NIL will also appear in the Road to Glory mode, in which you create a player and take them throughout their college career (and can even import into Madden).

“It's kind of making a game fantasizing about how that game, will recognize it now, but then fully recognizing that NIL is not solved,” Holt said. “It's not solidified, and it's constantly changing. So all those things kind of play a role in how we've dealt with it. And now we're looking to deal with it as we go forward.”

Holt declined to comment on how EA College Sports 25 would handle other developing aspects of college sports sponsorship, such as on-field ads , jersey patches or conference naming rights .

Old guard vs. new guard

EA Sports faces a lot of questions with the return of college football on July 19. A small-yet-passionate base of fans kept updating the last game with custom updates for players for years, sharing info files and insights. But how does EA woo a generation of fans who have never played its college football video game -- or older players who would love to again?

“They're easy and hard in their own way,” Holt said. “If I had to compare the two, it's always harder to create new players. But at the same time, what we see with this generation of players and how they have evolved as digital natives in gaming is their social network of sorts.” But Holt noted one out of every three people on the planet still play video games.

But when it comes to EA Sports College Football 25, Holt said, “The new guard] may follow players more than teams. They're not going to sit on a couch and watch a three-hour football game with their dad, but they're going to follow players. They're going to follow stats. They're going to follow social. But the interesting reality is there's still a subtle nuance there of someone picking a team. I've seen it with my own child in terms of the rivalries between schools. That stuff still exists, and that's very organic, and that happens no matter what. We just have to be there to give them something that excites them, interests them and allows them to be uniquely their sports fan-self in a new generation.”

But just remember, Cal fans -- don't go looking for your team in the Pac-12 roster. The Golden Bears are in the ACC now .

Roland Garros is a fixture in Gilles Simon’s life. The retired French tennis star started training at the storied facility as a young child, and today, he lives nearby the Parisian venue.

Simon now coaches the No. 5-ranked Daniil Medvedev, but he had an additional reason to be at the French Open this year -- gaming. Simon competed in the Roland Garros eSeries, playing Tennis Clash (a mobile game from Wildlife Studios with more than 150 million downloads since 2019) in the French Open’s esports competition.

“I’ve really been into video games since I was really young,” Simon said. “Last year, they had this competition, and they asked me to commentate for it. It was a nice experience. ... So this year, I said, ‘OK, why not try to play the event and see how it goes?’”

Competitive tennis, even if it’s playing a video game, helped fill a gap for Simon, who retired after 2022 from a career in which he won 14 titles and was ranked as high as sixth on the ATP Tour (July 2009).

“I was really doing nothing, and it was strange,” Simon said. “I live 500 meters away from the stadium. It’s part of my life. My wife is working there all year round. So I’m never far from it.”

Simon reached the quarterfinal round this year, finishing in the top eight. “I had a bit of pressure because I had to compete against video gamers that are super good, that [have been] playing the games for five years already. They're like machines, you know?”

After getting a taste for the video game side, look for Simon to be back competing at Roland Garros eSeries again next year.

• MLB: The Show 24 notched a fifth-place finish in tracking firm Circana’s best-selling video games list for May, a one-slot bump from April’s performance and leading all sports games for the month.

• Riot Games "canceled work on a prototype platform fighter (think Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.) code-named Pool Party in late May," sources tell Mikhail Klimentov in his latest gaming newsletter.

• EA Sports released a list of the top 100 players in EA Sports College Football 25, with headliners such as Liberty HB Quinton Cooley and Georgia's Oscar Delp. Not included on that list -- yet at least -- is backup Texas QB Arch Manning, who this week released a video alongside his uncle, Eli Manning, announcing that he will be part of the game’s release.

• The U.K. regulatory body, the Advertising Standards Authority, "found that EA has been misleading customers in a paid-for Facebook ad regarding the presence of loot boxes in Golf Clash," reports GamesIndustry.biz.

• Microsoft "is planning to hike its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate pricing again in September," and it will also launch "a new 'standard' subscription that doesn’t include day-one access to first-party Xbox games," writes The Verge. The price is going to $19.99/month beginning Sept. 12, "a $3 increase over the current $16.99/month pricing." Sports games, such as Madden NFL and NBA 2K, are mainstays of Games Pass, and subscription revenue, from products like this and battle passes, have become an important source of revenue as development costs continue to grow.

• EA is "looking to usher in a new era of soccer gaming with an EA Sports FC 25 release date of Sept. 27, according to a recent leak," reports IGN. The leak also notes that the Standard Edition "comes with the base experience for $69.99," which matches its current price on the Steam PC Gaming platform.

• Playfly Sports' esports division rebranded its college esports ecosystem to Playfly College Esports. The new league will continue to operate competitions for the Collegiate Chess League, the eNASCAR College iRacing Series, PUBG Mobile Campus Championship and Big East esports under the new banner.

• Let's end the first SBJ Gaming newsletter on a wholesome note. During the annual Summer Games Done Quick charity event over the Fourth of July weekend, a 4-year-old Shibu Inu named Peanut Butter hit a home run while he and his human companion played a sports gaming classic, 1994's Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for the Super Nintendo, per Kotaku. This year's SGDQ benefited Doctors Without Borders.