The recent news that EA and FIFA had parted ways after a 30-year partnership came as a shock to many fans around the world. There is no doubt that money played a huge part in the decision, but the need for change also played a key role, which is why EA has announced they will be looking at creating a new game under the ‘Sports FC’ title.
The FIFA titles have been turning stale for quite some time now though, fans often argue that the games lack imagination, often resulting in carbon copies of previous installments, but with better graphics. And the fans have a point because, graphics aside, you could play FIFA 16 and FIFA 22 back-to-back and not notice a difference. A change has been needed and it could be the making of EA’s future sports game.
Andrew Wilson is the boss over at EA, and he spoke about the decision to end the partnership when talking to The New York Times by saying that some of the company’s motivation was to “improve players’ experiences without being pigeonholed.” Wilson went into more detail by saying “It was really about how can we do more for the players, more for the fans, how can we offer them more modalities to play.” Wilson added, “How can we bring more partners into the game, how can we expand beyond the bounds of the traditional game.”
What Wilson says correlates well with what the vice president of EA told the BBC. David Jackson spoke about how “The world of football and the world of entertainment is changing, and they clash within our product. In the future our players will demand from us the ability to be more expansive in that offering,” said Jackson. He added, “Under the licensing conventions that we had agreed with FIFA 10 years ago, there were some restrictions that weren’t going to allow us to be able to build new experiences for our loyal fanbase.”
FIFA president Gianni Infantino even had his say on the recent news by saying “the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available for gamers and football fans”, we’d be surprised if he’s ever picked up a control pad in his life, but that’s for another day.
So, fans of the franchise will have to see what actual plans EA have in store for their new ‘Sports FC’ game instead of just ideas, and hopefully, it will inject some new life into the dying soccer games. If you don’t know already, FIFA 23 is going to be the last installment in this franchise, and we could probably guess what it will be like already without even playing it.
