EA Sports NCAA Basketball

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#51      
the juiceman cometh
dcenters33 said:
Just did some more reading, turns out that 2k isn't even making a standalone CBB game. They're just adding select teams to NBA2k's MyTeam mode. This was my worst case scenario. Even more reason to hate 2k.
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Honestly just seems like 2K did this to kill a potential competitor on the cheap. Now they can pay a handful of schools, and not the hundreds EA was going to pay, and in the process keep a potentially popular rival basketball game off the market. 2K can keep churning out the same subpar game year after year without having to worry about a CBB game eating into its revenue.

I do wish EA had more backbone though. They can still do the game, they just won't have exclusivity. Basically, they want exclusivity because it guarantees they'll be the only CBB game and makes it more likely they'll turn a profit even if the game sucks. If they make a good game they don't need the backstop of exclusivity.
 
#52      
MikeTisdale
EA wanted exclusivity because that's the model they used for the college football game and they likely have a decent model as to how much sales they could generate going that way (and how much they'd need to pay for that exclusive license).

Unlike for CFB though, they'd have to build a basketball engine from scrap (or use the NBA live engine they had from 2019 that's likely pretty outdated at this point). That likely means they need a good multi-year projection of sales for this game and it's annual iterations to get to profitability. Problem is without the exclusive license, 2K could see how well sales were for EAs game in year one and then pretty easily port their NBA game into a full college game and steal a bunch of sales year 2 - essentially lets EA take all the risk to set the market and then they get to slide in afterwards with a lot more knowns than unknowns.

I'm not going to lose sleep over either of these giant companies making a little less money, but it would be nice to have an all encompassing NCAA basketball game and unfortunately the EA model was the only realistic way that was going to happen. I would have though the NCAA would have more sway in licensing for these kinds of things like the other sports leagues, they could have pushed it towards EA to get a full game made (which had to have been bigger $ for them than a handful of one off non-exclusive deals for bigger schools).
 
#53      
BalloonsTheElephant
the juiceman cometh said:
Honestly just seems like 2K did this to kill a potential competitor on the cheap. Now they can pay a handful of schools, and not the hundreds EA was going to pay, and in the process keep a potentially popular rival basketball game off the market. 2K can keep churning out the same subpar game year after year without having to worry about a CBB game eating into its revenue.

I do wish EA had more backbone though. They can still do the game, they just won't have exclusivity. Basically, they want exclusivity because it guarantees they'll be the only CBB game and makes it more likely they'll turn a profit even if the game sucks. If they make a good game they don't need the backstop of exclusivity.
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EA did something similar to 2K by buying exclusive rights to the NFL and effectively killing the NFL2K franchise which was light years ahead of Madden.
 
#54      
the juiceman cometh
BalloonsTheElephant said:
EA did something similar to 2K by buying exclusive rights to the NFL and effectively killing the NFL2K franchise which was light years ahead of Madden.
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True. This is why I don't like these exclusive deals - kills competition and then there's no incentive to make a great product. The big difference with this situation is that 2K doesn't need to make a CBB game. They already have the basketball video game market cornered. I don't expect we will get a standalone CBB game from them.
 
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