EA Sports announced on Feb. 2 it had struck a licensing agreement to create College Football, a new series that returns college teams to video game consoles. It’s very early in development, and a lot more is to come about the final product and what it will bring, or bring back, to fans.
Five days before pro football’s big game™️, fans got a jolt of joyous news from the colleges: EA Sports is getting back into college football! The developer of the dear, departed NCAA Football series announced a new partnership with the colleges’ licensing authority, which will bring their bowl games, mascots, and rivalries to consoles for the first time in eight years. Because such things depend on licensing, and because most of the licensors in question are image-conscious institutions of higher learning in America, sports fans are probably thinking, “So what’s the catch?” The biggest one is that the game is very early in development — it will not be launching this year, an EA Sports executive told ESPN. Later Friday, the newly minted College Football Twitter account mentioned the game will be developed “in the next couple of years.” We’re blown away by your passion for #EASPORTSCollegeFootball. We look forward to sharing more information as development progresses in the next couple of years. Whenever it gets here, it’s still been a glacial era since the last NCAA Football video game in 2013 — it connects three console generations, after all. So it’s probable that many of the features, bells, and whistles that made the NCAA Football series such an immersive delight in 2013 will not be around on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Here’s a recap of what we know so far, how we got here, and what our best guess is for how things will go when college football returns. No. At least, as of now, it won’t. EA’s Daryl Holt said the game would not launch in 2021, and it is still early in development. But by the time College Football does arrive, the NCAA could have passed changes to its amateurism rules that would allow football players (and other athletes) to be compensated for the use of their name, image, and likeness (those three words are a key term throughout the litigation and discussion of college athletes getting paid). Related If these “NIL” rights are accommodated, and players can be paid for making commercial endorsements or appearances at sports camps for youngsters, then they could be paid to appear under their own names (and images, and likenesses) in a video game, while still performing during their four years of eligibility in school. In an interview with The Washington Post’s Launcher vertical, the lead attorney in the lawsuit that helped end the original NCAA Football series said he believed EA Sports was making an educated bet that changes to the NIL rules are coming soon, and they had better be ready to go when that happens. “There’s no reason they shouldn’t have a seat [at the table],” the attorney, Michael Hausfeld, told Launcher. “EA was willing to give them [the athletes] a seat and to give them a portion of the pie. This is the only way they can open the door.” Yes. This is not some mobile game, or a college-branded bait-and-switch that bears little resemblance to its predecessor. The statement from EA Sports and CLC (the licensing body for most of the universities) specified that this is a simulation sports video game, on consoles. That means a sports video game in the mold of Madden NFL, NBA 2K, or the old NCAA Football series we saw on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
