FIFA has confirmed that they are making a new video game.
As reported by Insider Gaming, FIFA President Gianni Infantino recently made this statement:
“We will develop a new e-game, because a football simulation game is called FIFA. For hundreds of millions of children around the world, when they play a football simulation game, they play FIFA. It cannot be named something else.”
EA had partnered with FIFA to make the eponymous video game franchise for nearly 30 years. Their first game together, FIFA International Soccer, launched on the Sega Genesis in 1993, and immediately became the best-selling title for the system in the UK.
By the time they had agreed to end their partnership with 2022’s FIFA 23, however, EA’s relationship with the football league had soured. EA alleged that FIFA held too much control over their franchise because of the license, and that actually meant the developers couldn’t add features or experiment with some new ideas.
It was the snowballing of the developer’s discontent, and the disintegration of their relationship, that led to EA deciding to make a clean break and starting over with EA Sports FC 24. At the time of the launch of this title, EA had essentially monopolized the association football video game niche.
But this was not for lack of trying. For years, EA’s FIFA did have game competition, against the likes of Sensible Soccer and Pro Evolution Soccer. For a few good years, Pro Evolution Soccer was on equal footing with FIFA, with both games even borrowing ideas from each other.
By the 2010s, however, EA’s FIFA games started creating a huge lead over Pro Evolution Soccer, and their competition had become lopsided ever since. Pro Evolution Soccer’s owner, Konami, decided to recently rebrand the game to eFootball, but clearly, that hasn’t quite worked out for them.
But the exciting detail here is how Infantino’s statement matches up to a rumor from a few days before. We recently reported that a retailer named Mohplay claimed that 2K Games recently picked up the FIFA license.
Notably, Infantino didn’t confirm that FIFA was now working with 2K Games, but it’s certainly exciting news, on a historical level as much as it would be relevant today. Visual Concepts and their 2K sports franchise had themselves been competing with EA on sports games for many years. The studio was originally hired by Sega to make them exclusive sports games on the Dreamcast to compete with EA itself.
Visual Concepts never actually made a 2K association football game, as they did focus on US based sports licenses, such as the NHL, the NFL, MLB, and of course, the NBA. Interestingly enough, there have been rumors that they were making a Lego football game, called LEGO 2K Goooal! While LEGO 2K Goooal! has yet to surface, it would be quite a get for 2K to make this the next FIFA game, or if they competed with EA hard by making two new association football game franchises.
