Would College Football 15 have worked in this manner? Is a generic but customizable game commercially viable? Sound off!

 

 

Jayson Young: Aside from the one-off success of the original Blitz: The League, no unlicensed console football game this century has ever cracked a million units sold.

And from NCAA Football 10 on up to its recently completed season, Electronic Arts' college football franchise was consistently selling around 1.5 million copies a year on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 combined.

That doesn't seem like a title that was returning great profits, when the rights to schools, as well as their fight songs, their stadiums, and even the television network on which their games appear, all had to be bargained with.

If High Score Productions (creators of Bill Walsh College Football), and later on, EA Tiburon, were not able to share development costs every year with Madden NFL, then the NCAA Football series would likely have never even started, much less continued for over two decades.

So the question EA asked itself internally was, "If we cut out the costs of paying the NCAA, can we still move enough copies -- and earn enough microtransactions -- to stay profitable?"

If not even Ultimate Team, which made its franchise debut in NCAA Football 14, and utilized the same NFLPA license that EA still possesses, was enough to convince the executives at Electronic Arts to continue this series with an unlicensed main game, then I can only agree with one of the richest publishers in the industry's business sense.

 

 

Robert Kollars: I think Jayson nailed the biggest part of the equation. If the powers that be thought there was a realistic shot of this title being profitable at the level they were used to, it would have been released. While profitability is always going to be the main concern, when you start to add in the ongoing litigation(s), the uncertainty of what was going to be permissible and what was not, the picture was starting to get quite murky. In my experiences in this industry, investors, and legal teams do not like to play in the realm of the unknown.

I think as fans of the series, we look at the inclusion of a true editor and think that is all we really needed, and from a hardcore fan's perspective, that's probably true. Sadly though, corporations, investors, and legal teams do not look at these titles from a fans perspective.

As easy as it is for the group of fans on Operation Sports to say  "I would have bought the game regardless" we have to remember that a contingency of sports fans on a sports video game website is not the casual demographic that pushes the profitability of the products we love. It's the casual fan who picks it up because they like college football, and those fans are typically not the ones who spend hours tweaking rosters, creating option files of team and conference logos to be shared, much less who are willing to use an editor to enhance the authenticity.

So as much I love the series and miss it, my answer from a business point of view, is no, the game would not have worked.

 

 

Chris Sanner: The thing about unlicensed (partially in this case), customizeable sports games is that they sound really, really good to hardcore fans who can find the resources to fellow fans to be willing to create resources to make the game recognizeable. For the average joe, these games will not be a viable option to plop $60 down on ever.

So from that standpoint, a College Football game in the ilk of what we were hearing rumored was going to be a commercial flop. Changing the name of the series was bad enough, doing so while also losing marketable and recognizable trademarks was going to make the game experience feel cheapened, no matter how much hardcore fans would have bought into the game.

While the NCAA series was a consistent profit producer and heavy revenue generator (average of $80 million per year over its life-cycle), it was also a series which needed the licenses to work. I have no idea, in an era where fans get mad about players having the wrong tattoos, shoe sizes, and hair styles -- how EA Sports was going to market a game missing conferences and schools, much less players.

 

The simple fact is, generic sports games at full retail prices of their licensed competitors are not commercially viable products. They never have been and never will be. When you talk about a game losing authenticity in terms of licenses but also trying to deliver an authentic experience -- that's an almost impossible task.

In short, if/when college games return -- it'll be because there is more licensing and realism than ever, not less.

 

 

What about you? Do you think College Football 15 would have worked or do you think it was doomed from the get go?