Why Exclusivity Deals are Bad
If you’ve been paying any attention to the world of sports video games you will have no doubt caught wind of how fabulous things are going for the genre. EA Sports leads the pack and their Madden, FIFA, and NHL franchises are all doing fantastic. At a time when video game sales overall are down, sports games seem to be thriving. Why is that? The biggest reason has to do with the seasonal nature of the sports they simulate. Every season brings new trades, draft picks, coaching staff, and even new rules and these changes are the greatest contributing factor that creates the demand to purchase these games.
The logic runs something like this: People who purchase these games are fans of the sport and enjoy playing the game. They get enough enjoyment that they are willing to spend $60 in order to play it. Time goes by and a year later they fire up the game and realize how dated it has become. Key players are on the wrong team. None of the team’s stats line up with where they should be. The only solution is to go put out another $60 to get the updates for the new season. When this happens there will be some additional enjoyment from whatever trivial new features have been added and visual quality also gets a small bump up every year as well, but how many people would shell out $60 a year for those mild improvements?
The sad truth of the matter is that oftentimes there is no other choice. When it comes to sports games, Madden is king and it also serves as the best example of what’s wrong with the status quo. EA Sports has had an exclusivity agreement with the NFL since 2004 and will likely continue to pursue such a strategy for as long as it can. This means that no other football game will be viable as long as this deal is in place. Outside of the NFL, EA Sports will no longer have exclusive rights to making NCAA football games due to the recent settling of a class action lawsuit. They also cannot pursue a deal with Arena Football. Who cares? As long as a decent NFL game exists, no one is honestly going to pick up the Arena game and the NCAA game will always be second tier. This puts EA in the position where without doing anything at all, they get consumers who want to get upgraded rosters every year with no where else to go.
Now lets look at Basketball games. 2K Sports, who is the biggest competitor to EA Sports, has been going strong with their NBA 2K titles annually. They, like EA Sports, also seem to be fans of exclusive agreements as they have one with the MLB for making baseball games. EA Sports is desperately trying to become a bigger player in this segment and would obviously like to dominate for this sport as well. EA Sports is so serious about this that they recently shelved NBA Live 13 because it didn’t meet their standards. Their efforts will go towards making NBA Live 14 better for next year. EA realizes that because they will be competing with 2K Sports’s NBA 2K13, they can’t just put out anything and expect it to sell. This will be great for consumers. Multiple developers will be working hard to sell us competing products.
The ideal would be to have a situation where you could purchase roster updates as DLC. I cannot think of a better use for DLC. For obvious reasons this will never happen if exclusivity agreements are in place. Updated rosters are the main reason people buy the new games every year and offering this as DLC would only bring revenues down. Even with this DLC available, people would still purchase newer versions, just not as frequently. It’s not like everyone is going to keeping sporting (sorry) their ancient version and just update the roster forever. This could be very plausible if competitors were allowed entry. A developer could even work it into its business model and only release a game ever other year while filling in the empty year with a roster update DLC. Frankly, I’d probably enjoy the new games more if they came out every other year because this would allow for a more substantive difference compared to the previous game.
Full Disclosure: I generally like games by EA Sports. I think their latest lineup is quite good. I also generally like games by 2K Sports. I just wish everything didn’t have to be so . . . exclusive.