arena-football posts

Electronic Arts loves sports games, especially football which has been the company's bread and butter for a long time. The publisher generated a ton of controversy when it announced a few years ago that it had secured an exclusive third party NFL game license which put other NFL games from Midway and 2K Games out of the picture. Now two gamers have apparently had enough and are taking EA to court.

According to an article on Gamespot, the two unnamed gamers filed a class action lawsuit in the US District Court of Northern California. It alleges that EA participated in "blatantly anticompetitive conduct" in gaining the exclusive NFL franchise back in 2005. Before that event 2K Sports released NFL 2K5 at a price point of $19.95 which ate into EA's revenues for its rival NFL Madden game. However, instead of just lowering the price and making a better product for the next year, EA decided to just buy the exclusive rights to NFL games along with Arena Football and NCAA football games. The suit claims that such actions, along with EA's proposed takeover of 2K Sports' parent company Take Two Interactive "would remove one of the few companies with the ability and expertise to compete in the market for interactive football software." EA has yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Of course this mostly affect console gamers, especially now since EA decided this year not to release a PC port of Madden NFL. However if this lawsuit is successful perhaps this will get NFL games from other publishers on the PC platform once more. We are all in favor of competition and it's clear that with EA's current lock on the NFL franchise they hold all the cards on having true licensed pro football games on the PC. With their decision to deny PC gamers that opportunty this year it just adds more fuel to the fire for this lawsuit to succeed.