EA Sports
It’s officially been more than a decade since the last iteration of EA Sports’ NCAA Football video game franchise was released before the company was forced to discontinue the beloved series after the Supreme Court ruled it had improperly harnessed the name, image, and likeness of student-athletes.
However, fans got a glimmer of hope after the Supreme Court ushered in the NIL Era in 2020, and less than a year later, EA Sports announced NCAA Football was officially coming back from the dead.
The company had originally planned to reboot the franchise this summer but ultimately decided to push the release to 2024, and while there’s no reason to believe it will be delayed for a second time, there’s still plenty of uncertainty surrounding the upcoming game thanks to some roadblocks that have appeared in recent months.
In June, the CFBPA (which is essentially college football’s players’ union) announced it planned to boycott the game over the lackluster compensation package EA Sports had reportedly floated shortly before The Brandr Group (which represents a large chunk of student-athletes) took a similar stance.
That second party is currently engaged in a lawsuit with EA Sports as the production team continues to work on polishing the upcoming game, and while there’s no telling what the future holds, it seems like the company is pretty optimistic its plans won’t be derailed.
According to Video Games Chronicle, EA CEO Andrew Wilson provided the latest update on the status of NCAA Football during a recent earnings call where he had this to say about the ongoing development:
“The team’s doing an incredible job building out what will be the future of college football.
Gameplay is really coming together, and really capturing all the action of pageantry, and the difference in college football versus the NFL. I feel really confident in what the team’s doing.”
He also added “many—if not most” of the schools you’d expect to appear in the game have already agreed to licensing deals before turning his attention to the elephant in the room, saying:
“We’ll continue to work with the various governing bodies of the sport in the country, and some key third-party partners we have, around how and when to include college athletes themselves into the game, and we’ll work very closely with them…
I do believe that we’ll find a place where we can work in lockstep with the athletes for inclusion in the game as well.”
Fingers crossed.