EA Can Now Officially Kiss My Ass

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/sportsbusiness/news/story?id=1945691

Seems that EA bought out ALL the rights to the NFL as far as video games are concerned, which means no more NFL2K series, no more NFL Gameday, and no more Blitz games. That's a shame. I bought both ESPN NFL2K5 and Madden 2005, and I felt that while 2K5 didn't have as many features as Madden, the game itself was a lot more fun to play. Now EA can get away with just doing roster updates every year, but I'll be damned if I'll buy them.

EA is no different from Microsoft anymore, with their philosophy of buying out every market they can't dominate with superior product. I guess I'll concentrate on RPG's from now on, at least until EA buys the rights to the terms "HP" and "MP".

After all, the NFL is the one sport that gave exclusive rights to its season pass to a limited outlet (DirecTV).

I don't understand it, to be honest. Why limit your output?

they'll both make millions

i miss the EA of yore.

I know I would if I were the president of a company with a big stake in obtaining pro sports licenses.

In the long run, this isn't good for anyone, EA included.

ESPN 2K5 was a pretty good game, I thought, and if they aren't making it any more, then that's a major problem. It seems to me, though, that if anybody has the resources to challenge this, it's the alliance between ESPN and Sega.

Sega was kicking its' ass this year. Also EA is getting sued by its' employees for mistreatment. Forcing them to work overtime with no pay.

I could care less about sports games, because I don't play them, but I really resent the bullshit copy protection they put on Sims 2 where it won't install on machines with Alcohol 120% installed on them.

Newsflash EA: not every Alcohol user is a warez kiddie, some of us use the program to make mountable images of games we actually purchased but can't play straight from the CD due to the ignorant-ass copy protection conflicting with our CD drives and crashing our computers (*cough*NeverwinterNights*cough*). Stupid, goddamn copy protection, and stupid, goddamn EA for being part of the problem. Warez kiddies will get around it regardless of what they do and the only people hurt by it are people who actually buy the software.

Funny you should mention RPGs, since EA made LotR the Third Age, which is probably one of the most shameless Final Fantasy clones since Wild ARMs 2 (and that's saying something). It's like they took FFX and a couple of bad LotR fanfics and put them in a blender, hit pulse, and burned it to disc.

At least I'm pretty sure EA was responsible for that mess; my rage could just be making me incoherent.