E-Mail This Article to a Friend The ravenous beast Electronic Arts and the monopolization of an industry BY MITCH KRPATA

I nearly did a spit take when I saw the headline: "Arena Football League gives EA exclusive rights to games." It was big news for the industry a few weeks ago when we found out that Electronic Arts, and only Electronic Arts, would be producing NFL- and NFLPA-branded games from now on. But the Arena Football League? The league that counts among its team owners New Jersey rocker and Duracell pitchman Jon Bon Jovi? Surely you jest.

EA's acquisition of the exclusive NFL license was unexpected, but not altogether unsurprising. Sega's ESPN NFL 2K5, despite its overload of capital letters, thundered onto the video football scene with its $19.99 price tag. And while ESPN wasn't quite as good as 2005's installment in the venerable Madden franchise, there was no denying that it was a much better value – probably the best "value-priced" software of all time. Electronic Arts, despite being the biggest video-game publisher in the world, obviously panicked.

You don't get to be number one unless you've got a few tricks up your sleeve. Having boxed Sega out of the NFL game, EA took the possibly unnecessary step of also locking up Arena Football. If Sega and ESPN want any kind of cross-branding now, Vince McMahon is going to have to revive the XFL. This is not to suggest that people won't play football games with cleverly-disguised facsimiles of real teams and players, but, let's face it: would Tecmo Bowl have been half as fun without Video Bo Jackson?

The NFL license is a crucial component of a video football game's success. Now that EA has shut the door on any real competition, it might be instructive to look at a critical point in the history of the Madden franchise. Let's get in the Way-Back Machine and travel to a primitive, unenlightened time: the mid 1990s.

Along with Sonic the Hedgehog, John Madden's eponymous football franchise had propelled the Sega Genesis from pretender to contender. At first a Sega exclusive, Madden ports to the Super Nintendo proved maddeningly slow and hard to control. And since the series was far and away the best, eclipsing even Joe Montana's SportsTalk Football (remember that?), the Madden name was etched in bronze – until the 32-bit era.

For whatever reason, EA proved ill-suited to adapt to three-dimensional gameplay. The company had grown fat and content with its Madden series, and the first PlayStation Madde, the 1996 edition, was shaping up to be little better than its 16-bit forebears. Players were still two-dimensional sprites, and game control was still accomplished with an eight-directional system. Meanwhile, an in-house development studio at Sony called 989 Sports was quietly crafting the first fully-3D football game, dubbed GameDay.

When the sales figures hit for the inaugural edition of GameDay, EA must have felt like Tony Eason in Super Bowl XX. Sony had knocked the king right on his ass. GameDay's advanced gameplay gave new depth to the running game, and the graphics were on a whole new level. EA struggled with their next-gen installment, until the day they made the official announcement: Madden NFL 1996 would not ship.

A reinvigorated Electronic Arts hired a new development team and built Madden '97 from scratch. Sony had awoken a sleeping giant; within a few years, the GameDay franchise was foundering and Madden was right back on top. Each new Madden installment since 2000 could reasonably have been called the best ever.

The moral of this story is not a difficult one to glean. When EA grew complacent and had no serious competitors, the product suffered; when the wolves of Sony and Sega were at the door, EA fought back by releasing better games. Now, where's their incentive?

Acquiring the AFL license was little more than a twist of the knife. The Arena Football League has no serious cachet with the mass market, but it was an incredibly shrewd move by Electronic Arts. They have effectively eliminated their competition. But as we've seen in the past, in a competition there are winners and losers. When there is no competition, there are only losers.