A burst of innovation in the battle for National Football League fans transformed sports video games in an unexpected way.
Twenty years ago this month, Sega aggressively promoted ESPN NFL 2K5, slashing its price and releasing it weeks before Madden NFL 2005, the more established franchise. The dynamic running game and gang tackles in NFL 2K5, which was developed by Visual Concepts, were complemented by its immersive presentation, with animation-specific commentary, a comprehensive halftime show and a first-person under-the-helmet mode.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, how did they do all of that this year?’” said Ian Cummings, a former producer for Madden, which is developed by Electronic Arts. “They clearly had thrown the kitchen sink at us.”
There’s a world in which Electronic Arts responded with further innovations that then spurred additional ideas from its primary challenger, creating a gaming golden age. And then there is what actually happened: Electronic Arts signed an exclusive license with the N.F.L. and its players’ union months after the showdown, becoming the sole studio permitted to use the league’s players, teams and other official markings in simulation video games.
The ramifications can be felt two decades later.
Both NFL 2K5 and Madden 2005 joined the pantheon of greatest sports video games, along with titles like NHL ’94, MVP Baseball 2005 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. But there is a nagging sense that the genre has stagnated as the marketplace has consolidated.
Major League Baseball has an exclusive license with San Diego Studio, which makes MLB: The Show, and the NBA 2K and NHL franchises also have no competition. FC, the series formerly known as FIFA, is no longer being challenged by Pro Evolution Soccer.
In a risk-averse industry, studios have largely avoided expensive uphill battles against an established market leader. Phil Frazier, a former designer and producer for Madden, said the shift toward monopolies had created a conservative approach.
“It’s allowed those companies to really dig in and solidify their positions in those products, but I don’t think it’s been great for sports innovation all up as an industry,” Frazier said. “I just think you lose perspective.”
Electronic Arts and the N.F.L. declined to comment, citing confidentiality terms of their agreement, which the partners have renewed several times. 2K, the publisher that Take-Two Interactive created when it acquired Visual Concepts, declined to comment.
The consolidation has been lucrative for Electronic Arts, which generates hundreds of millions of dollars through an Ultimate Team mode where players can spend real money to buy packs of digital players. Video game sales are not thorough and transparent like the Hollywood box office, but the research company Circana used available data to determine that Madden 24 was the third-highest-selling game last year.
Despite Madden’s popularity, its annual summer release has been increasingly accompanied by grumbling online that Electronic Arts is selling the same fundamental product with updated rosters. On the gaming website IGN, the critic Will Borger praised Madden 24’s on-field animations and A.I. opponents but said its “tweaks just aren’t enough to make up for the series’ continued feeling of sameness and lack of progress.”
The past four Madden games have received an aggregate rating in the 60s on Metacritic, a considerable drop from the high scores of decades past. Madden 2005 earned a 91 rating and NFL 2K5 received a 92.
Going Exclusive
Electronic Arts published its first Madden game, named after the coach and broadcaster John Madden, in 1988. Visual Concepts, which developed some Madden titles in the mid-1990s, debuted its own series, NFL 2K, in 1999.
Those franchises headlined a bountiful era for football fans. In the fall of 2001, gaming options also included NFL QB Club, NFL GameDay, ESPN NFL PrimeTime and NFL Fever.
Because consumers had so much choice in that time period, developers were compelled to improve their games, Frazier, the former Madden designer, said.
“Different products out on the market were exploring different expressions of a sport that we loved,” Frazier said, “and I always looked at each of these games and the areas they were choosing to innovate as a source of possible inspiration.”
That vibrant marketplace changed quickly after NFL 2K5 was released.
Brandon Justice, who worked as a producer on both Madden and NFL 2K, said his colleagues understood that selling NFL 2K5 for $20 when Madden was $50 might suggest it was an inferior product and cheaply made. (Justice said Electronic Arts spent more on its marketing efforts than 2K did on product development.) But for the studio, the opportunity to attract more customers outweighed those concerns.
“With the rivalry and the quality of the game, we always felt like, ‘If we could just get people to play it, they would see that we’re the cool brother,’” Justice said. “And the proof was in the pudding because it definitely worked.”
Three months after releasing Madden 2005, which was losing market share, Electronic Arts cut the price to $30.
The N.F.L. had been considering the merits of an exclusive video game license months before NFL 2K5 was released. It works with one official sponsor in many business sectors, such as the Marriott hotel chain and the Visa credit card company.
But the league’s decision to partner with Electronic Arts — The New York Times reported in 2004 that the initial five-year deal was worth at least $300 million — raised speculation that NFL 2K5’s consumer-friendly price might have backfired by tarnishing the league’s self-perceived premium brand.
Brian McCarthy, an N.F.L. spokesman, told The Bay Area News Group in 2005 that when the league evaluated video game bids, it considered factors like track record, quality and marketing. “We felt if we had a single licensee, there would be more incentive to develop even better games rather than being splintered,” he said.
In 2012, Electronic Arts settled a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of violating antitrust law with its exclusive licenses. The studio agreed to pay $27 million to consumers and refrain from pursuing exclusive licenses with the N.C.A.A. and the Arena Football League for five-year periods. Its contract with the N.F.L. was unaffected.
Michael Vick, who appeared on the cover of Madden 2004 while he was quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, said the consolidation increased the prestige of future endorsements. Fans frequently ask him to autograph copies of his Madden cover.
“In everything in life, I feel like you have to always keep your mystique,” said Vick, whose head-turning speed made him the equivalent of a cheat code in Madden. “Too much of anything is not good.”
Dexter Santos, an executive within the N.F.L. Players Association’s licensing and marketing arm, said there were also economic incentives to partnering with a single developer.
“I think sometimes athletes look at it like, ‘Well, there are more companies involved, therefore there are more opportunities,’” he said. “But at the same time, all companies aren’t created equal.”
After reaching the exclusive license, the N.F.L. gave Electronic Arts extra resources for Madden. Frazier said the league began providing official footage that teams use during film study, which designers then used to construct more accurate playbooks and player ratings.
That footage is shot in stadiums from an overhead angle, capturing all 22 players. Before the exclusive license, Frazier said, Madden designers would rely on recordings of games that were broadcast on television.
“We ended up getting signed up as like a 33rd N.F.L. team,” Frazier said.
The league also began more direct oversight, said Cummings, the former Madden producer, which included discouraging Electronic Arts from inserting animations of helmets that were dislodged during tackles. He said the exclusive license allowed the N.F.L., which has been criticized for traumatic brain injuries caused by collisions, to exert more control.
“It got a little bit harder to push things through,” Cummings said, “if they were on the edge of being a little violent or controversial.”
Innovate, or Try
It is difficult to innovate in sports simulation games, which are constricted by real-world rule sets and immovable annual deadlines.
Madden 25, which will be released next month, was forced to quickly adapt to the N.F.L.’s updated kickoff procedures. But drastic creative changes are rare compared with other game genres that can build alien worlds and narrative story arcs. The studio behind Baldur’s Gate 3 spent six years working on the acclaimed role-playing game; the open-world Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to come out in 2025, 12 years after its predecessor.
When Madden 2005 was released, with the devastating tackler Ray Lewis as its cover athlete, it made a splash with a popular “hit stick” mechanic that lets a defensive player gamble on a big collision; success can lead to a fumble while a mistimed button press might mean giving up a big gain. Twenty years later, Electronic Arts is promoting Madden 25 with “all-new Boom Tech,” which it describes as a re-engineered hit stick that provides more control.
Innovation does carry risks. NFL 2K5’s first-person mode was largely seen as a gimmick, and players revolted when Madden 2006 introduced “vision cones” that limited where quarterbacks could throw the ball effectively.
“You’re trying to maintain the things that work about your products and you’re trying to address things that aren’t quite where you want it to be,” Justice said.
Early iterations of the NFL 2K series were well received by critics. As Visual Concepts assessed its perceived strengths and Madden’s weaknesses heading into NFL 2K5, Justice said, the studio leaned into perfecting the game’s visual and audio elements.
NFL 2K5’s halftime show featured highlight packages voiced by the ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman, and the game introduced “The Crib,” where players could recreate classic N.F.L. scenarios and play games like air hockey. Electronic Arts noticed.
“It was something that we hadn’t yet chosen to prioritize — we were very focused on the whistle-to-whistle gameplay experience — and they did a really nice job of improving the cameras and the overall presentation of games,” Frazier said.
Over the past 15 years, Electronic Arts has focused on optimizing its Ultimate Team mode, which has a large fan base and generates considerable revenue. With no direct competition, there is little incentive to deviate.
Although the National Basketball Association does not have an exclusive video game license, the $1.1 billion, seven-year deal it reached with Visual Concepts in 2019 had a similar effect. Several months later, Electronic Arts canceled its longtime NBA Live franchise.
Visual Concepts has nibbled around the edges of the N.F.L.’s exclusive license, which was most recently extended in 2020 for a reported $2 billion in payments and marketing commitments. The studio behind NFL 2K released a simulation game in 2007 that used retired players including Barry Sanders and John Elway, and this year it partnered with the league on a mobile card-battler game.
Usurping Madden is not possible, though, because of its exclusive license.
Vick said that he had played an advance copy of Madden 25 and that the primary changes were graphical updates. But he said players should enjoy the game for what it is.
“I guarantee you, if you look at Madden 2013 versus Madden 2020 or 2021, you see a lot of differences and a lot of change,” Vick said. “Three years from now, it’ll be another great idea or another feature, so you got to be patient.”
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