EA Sports reportedly on track to release college football video game next summer
We will have a college football video game next year.
According to a report from Matt Brown, the open records request extraordinaire and publisher of Extra Points, EA Sports is still targeting a 2023 release date for its upcoming college football video game.
Brown’s report says the “industry expectation” is for every FBS program to be included in the game at its launch and for team-specific assets—things like band songs, crowd chants and cheers, and then obviously team branding—to be right there with each team. Players (and their likenesses) are also expected to be included, provided NIL issues can be sorted out.
The report suggests that EA is going to great lengths to make this as realistic a game as possible, including things like helmet stickers that would be given out as a player works their way through a season, similar to how they’d be awarded in real life.
This will be EA Sports’ first college football video game release since NCAA 14 in July of 2013. The company produced a college football video game annually that included team branding as well as ESPN broadcast packaging, but concerns over the use of player likeness without compensation forced a hiatus.
When the NCAA adopted new NIL legislation in July of 2021, one of the first questions that popped up online was whether it meant the popular video game could now return.
Brown reports that there is “optimism” EA can establish a framework for a group license—the way to pay players for use of their likeness in the game—possibly later this summer.