NCAA’s wish has finally been granted after nearly 5 years of court battles; but now their college Football series will be moving on from EA. NCAA Football 14 marks the last of the franchise with EA Sports, which their contract will formally expire in June 2014.
Now, if you’re hoping to see College Football make its grand return to 2K Sports in nearly a decade, you may very well see that happening in the near future along with College Hoops well (inside sources?). However, we’re not expecting to see the NFL and Electronic Arts having the same fallout the NCAA did, and bring back NFL 2K gaming.
While most of us behind-the-scenes here miss NFL 2K, it’s realistically not coming back in the foreseeable future due to Madden being the largest profitable sporting franchise and a top 5 third-party game every year. At least now, we’ll potentially have some form of 2K football; which we’re expecting a full deploy of custom created teams for our NFL fix.
You can read the full press release after the jump.
*UPDATE* EA Sports releases statement following NCAA’s after the jump.
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Here’s the NCAA full statement regarding the contract renewal situation.
The NCAA has made the decision not to enter a new contract for the license of its name and logo for the EA Sports NCAA Football video game. The current contract expires in June 2014, but our timing is based on the need to provide EA notice for future planning. As a result, the NCAA Football 2014 video game will be the last to include the NCAA’s name and logo. We are confident in our legal position regarding the use of our trademarks in video games. But given the current business climate and costs of litigation, we determined participating in this game is not in the best interests of the NCAA.
The NCAA has never licensed the use of current student-athlete names, images or likenesses to EA. The NCAA has no involvement in licenses between EA and former student-athletes. Member colleges and universities license their own trademarks and other intellectual property for the video game. They will have to independently decide whether to continue those business arrangements in the future.
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EA Sports vice president Andrew Wilson releases the following statement
By now, most fans will have heard that EA’s licensing agreement with the NCAA is set to expire and that we have agreed to part ways. I’m sure gamers are wondering what this means.
This is simple: EA SPORTS will continue to develop and publish college football games, but we will no longer include the NCAA names and marks. Our relationship with the Collegiate Licensing Company is strong and we are already working on a new game for next generation consoles which will launch next year and feature the college teams, conferences and all the innovation fans expect from EA SPORTS.
We took big creative strides with this year’s college game and you’ll see much more in the future. We love college football and look forward to making more games for our fans.
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