[promo title=”NFLPA Licensing Competition”][/promo]
Recently the NFL players association has announced that they will hold an open competition to win the licensing rights to develop a mobile game for the upcoming 2014 season. From March 20th through April 20th the NFLPA will hear pitches from developers and the Winner will receive the rights to NFLPA trademarks, likeness of players, names, bio info, voices, uniform numbers, and photos. Not to mention the winning developer will also be awarded $10,000 towards NFL player endorsements to use towards the game. This sounds like a great way for the best developer to be discovered and make the best mobile NFL game possible.
However there is a catch… Even though the NFLPA is awarding the rights to their license, the NFL holds a separate license which includes the rights to team names and logos. As most gamers know this NFL license has been held by EA since 2005 as NFL 2k5 was the last NFL game released by someone other than EA. This means that when Madden 15 is released later this year for consoles, we will see a mobile version for phones and tablets developed by EA. Although EA still has a lock on the NFL license this new competition may create a cold sweat for EA. With the NFLPA searching for a developer to compete with EA in the mobile space it is possible that the door is being unlocked to future competition in the NFL gaming space for consoles and PC. With the controversy that the Madden series has not made much progression in their yearly releases the past decade a calling for competition against Madden has found a strong following. If the NFLPA offers a similar competition in the future regarding console based games EA may have someone else in the space for the first time in over 10 years.
EA has been one of the most publicly criticized companies in the past few years, often dubbed the worst company in America. This bad publicity has taken its toll on the company and the NFL could possibly be looking for a way out of its current partnership. This is of course all speculative and no official word has been given from the NFL regarding its contract or relationship with EA. Gamers and critics of EA can only hope that this is a sign of things to come, and hopefully the NFL follows the lead of the NFLPA and opens their trademarks and likeness to other developers for future NFL games.