They think it’s all over … it is now. The lucrative corporate marriage that brought us 30 years of annual football simulations, and made billions of dollars in the process, is now defunct. Fifa and Electronic Arts (EA) have parted ways. And now the dust has settled on a day of frantic press releases, hype and guarded interviews, what sort of challenges face both entities as they jostle to reclaim the future of the footie sim for themselves?
Here’s my pretty safe bet: Fifa is going to have a tough time of it. Now freed from the exclusivity clause granted to EA, the company apparently has a range of “non-simulation” games due out this year from various developers. It’s likely these will be casual titles, probably for smartphones, crammed with micro-transactions and perhaps aimed at the huge Asian market for arena-based multiplayer games. If there’s a plausible Fifa: Clash of Teams game, perhaps with some NFTs thrown in, you can bet someone is working on it.
Fifa has claimed it will have a full Fifa football sim out in 2024, with president Gianni Infantino making a blustering promise that it will be “the only authentic, real game” and “the best one available for gamers and football fans”. This is, patently, a ludicrous piece of hubris, showing no understanding of modern video game development. EA’s titles represent the culmination of 30 years of sports sim development with a huge, dedicated and extremely experienced team. Where else is Fifa going to find that sort of expertise?
It could partner with Konami’s Pro Evolution studio (especially considering the difficult start for the latter’s current series, eFootball), but then Konami hasn’t really challenged EA’s Fifa games in more than a decade. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine any other large, established development studio in the world pivoting to sports sims in such a short space of time.
What about 2K games? It has the respected NBA 2K licence and its Visual Concepts studio has experience with basketball and American football – it even worked on the Madden series in the mid-1990s, so there are transferable skills here. But even then, making the best footie game available with barely two years’ dev time from a cold start? I don’t think so.
If Fifa is hoping to ride this out on brand recognition alone, it has another think coming. In 2003, Championship Manager was one of the biggest brands in sports gaming. Published by Eidos Interactive and developed by Sports Interactive, it was an institution. But in 2003, the two companies split, allegedly due to differences over royalty negotiations and the fact that both wanted more control over the franchise. What happened next should be instructive for both EA and Fifa.
Sports Interactive signed a new publishing deal with Sega and bought the rights to Kevin Toms’ vintage sim brand, Football Manager. “The team in place at SI were the team behind the game, we had the database and we’d spent the previous decade plus building the community,” recalls Sports Interactive CEO Miles Jacobson. “We were the ‘owners’ of all of those things. And the sum of those is way more important than the brand – even back in those days where the internet wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now.
“I’d be lying if I said we were never worried about it. We were confident, but not arrogant. It took a lot of work not just from us, but also our partners at Sega.”
Eidos, meanwhile, set up a new team, Beautiful Game Studios, to take over work on Championship Manager, no doubt thinking the brand would make up for the relative lack of experience. The resulting game, Championship Manager 5, was released a year late and riddled with bugs, and despite four subsequent iterations and a brief afterlife as a mobile game brand, the series never got close to challenging Football Manager as a serious sim. Whomever Fifa partners with for the next “official” Fifa game, if the quality’s not there, it’s unlikely to succeed.
One thing is certain: this heralds the end of an era, not just for the Fifa games but for the very idea of selling big tentpole video games on annual physical discs. Konami hasn’t had huge success converting its Pro Evo series into a free-to-play service, but that won’t deter Electronic Arts from exploring live subscriptions for its future football games. No doubt the corporation has plans for a football metaverse, in which the game sits alongside livestreamed matches, influencer broadcasts and lots of expensive customisation options.
Beyond the final whistle, this messy breakup is going to have ramifications that spread out across the industry. Sitting down for a game of footie with your friends will never be the same again.