EA SPORTS FC 24

I'm past the point of finding it funny any more - I'm not interested in trolling. It's just genuinely heartbreaking as a football fan who is alienated every, single, year.

It feels like FIFA's a theme park ride and I'm being told "you're a bit old for this mate, take up fishing instead". Like the opposite of an age rating.

"You must be 15 or under to like this ride."

And fishing's shit (sorry @jaygrim).
 
Chris Davies said:
I'm past the point of finding it funny any more - I'm not interested in trolling. It's just genuinely heartbreaking as a football fan who is alienated every, single, year.

It feels like FIFA's a theme park ride and I'm being told "you're a bit old for this mate, take up fishing instead". Like the opposite of an age rating.

"You must be 15 or under to like this ride."

And fishing's shit (sorry @jaygrim).
Click to expand...
These games are now fully aimed at kids. FUT is where the money is (via the parents) of 8-18 year olds. Even most adult football gamers aren't bothered about a proper football simulation. It's just a virtual kickabout with their mates now and again.

Really, there's no business case to build a football simulator.
 
Jamezinho said:
These games are now fully aimed at kids. FUT is where the money is (via the parents) of 8-18 year olds. Even most adult football gamers aren't bothered about a proper football simulation. It's just a virtual kickabout with their mates now and again.

Really, there's no business case to build a football simulator.
Click to expand...
Which is everything wrong with games today. Used to be that games were made for the love of the topic (whether FPS, football, racing, fighting etc.). These days, the game is made purely for money. A few of the development team may still have the old 'passion', but they are vastly limited in what they can do
 


EDIT: Looks like it's behind a paywall. Here's the text from the article:

Few commercial partnerships in global sport have been as long-lasting, influential, or, indeed, lucrative, as that between Fifa and video game publisher EA Sports.

Their first collaboration, 1993’s Fifa International Soccer, timed to mark the following year’s US-hosted World Cup finals, and released on such long-gone gaming platforms as the Commodore Amiga, Sega Mega Drive, and the 3DO, was an unprecedented success, selling some 500,000 copies in the UK in its first month.

Over the course of 30 annual iterations, Fifa, as it’s affectionately known, has become the best-selling video game franchise in the world, amassing total sales of well over 350 million, and contributing the lion’s share of EA Sports’ $7.4 billion earnings in 2022. Its cultural standing has increased exponentially too, to the point where the annual player ratings reveal is as eagerly awaited a moment on the football calendar as the fixtures release.

EA Sports and FIFA’s most recent collaboration, Fifa 23, was the series’ most successful yet, shipping over 10 million units in its first week. It was also their last.

Rumours began circulating in 2021 that EA Sports and Fifa’s relationship had hit the rocks. The New York Times reported Fifa wanted to double the $150 million annual licensing fee EA Sports paid for use of the body’s name and inclusion of the World Cup in its games.

Leaked comments from a company all-hands meeting suggested EA might not be keen on such a deal, CEO Andrew Wilson reportedly telling staff, “basically, what we get from Fifa in a non-World Cup year is the four letters on the front of the box, in a world where most people don’t even see the box anymore because they buy the game digitally.”

In May 2022, Wilson confirmed the split and announced the birth of a new brand: EA Sports FC.

A year on, Telegraph Sport is sitting down with David Jackson, the English-born, Everton-supporting, VP of Brand, known universally to his EA Sports FC colleagues as ‘DJ’, to discuss one of the most significant and challenging rebrands in football history.

If Jackson harbours any remorse about his franchise’s recent conscious uncoupling then it’s extremely well-hidden. Naturally he’s both complementary and respectful about EA Sports’ now ex-partner, reflecting on “an incredibly beneficial two-way relationship”, but tellingly also echoing those leaked Wilson comments by admitting: “we don’t lose anything necessarily from moving in a different direction and having our own IP.”

So, were the reports of Fifa wanting to double its licensing fee accurate?

“It’s definitely one of many considerations that we’ve made,” answers Jackson. “We’re really intentional about working through the data that comes back from these rights holders. Are we getting enough value? Are our fans getting enough value? Are we giving value back? We’re a massive platform to showcase the very best IP in the world of football.

“Money is always going to play a role in any negotiation. And we are not going to shy away from the fact that it did in this case too. But it was far more about the limitations and the restrictions that our rights holder – understandably – places on any partner. And the things that our fans expect from us and will continue to demand from us in the future were unachievable when we didn’t own our own IP.

“If you imagine that you wanted to go build even trivial things like an apparel line, or something slightly more meaningful, like a media platform or a broadcast network, what are you going to call it? Because you can’t call it Fifa. And if you call it EA Sports it infers that it’s probably a bit more expansive than just global football.

“So we’re sort of in this sort of uncanny valley in between not fully wholly owning a football IP, and not being able to rely on a sports IP like EA Sports to be able to talk about football. So it was a natural progression towards owning our own brand. And money wasn’t necessarily the prime factor in our decision.”

There’s a noticeable echo here of another leaked comment attributed to Wilson that the Fifa licence was actually “an impediment” to the videogame’s growth. I ask Jackson what EA Sports can do now that it couldn’t do previously.

“All the while that we were called Fifa, there’s this sort of act of repetition,” he explains, “there’s like an annualised cycle around this game. ‘What did we do last year? And how can we improve this year?’ It’s iterative versus innovative. The mindset shift now, starting with a blank piece of paper and being able to move forward is really, really valuable for us. We are able to now be more expansive about the experiences we offer beyond gaming.

“We truly believe we’re an interactive experiences organisation,” Jackson continues. “That doesn’t have to mean something limited to either a mobile phone and a gaming sense, or a console. We think in the future, we’re going to have the opportunity to expand into more of the ways in which fans engage with football content now, whether that’s broadcast rights and IP, whether that’s media platform and passive forms of entertainment around predictions, live scores, and highlights. That wasn’t necessarily achievable to us when we didn’t own our own IP and it is now.”

If that sounds like a long-term plan then that’s because it is. The first milestone is launching EA Sports FC, or ‘FC’ as EA Sports hopes it will come to be called.

“That was part of the audible design choice that we made,” says Jackson of the naming process, “making sure that it was short and succinct and could be shared around the watercooler or on the playground.”

The game itself is being kept under wraps until a reveal event in Amsterdam in July, and Jackson won’t be drawn on revealing any specific new features. Instead he insists players will recognise pretty much from the off that EA Sports FC is something genuinely new and innovative as opposed to another yearly update with a different name.

One of those innovations could be better integration of the women’s game. EA Sports has championed the women’s game, putting Chelsea forward Sam Kerr on the cover of Fifa 23 alongside Kylian Mbappe, and licensing the UK’s WSL, North America’s NWSL, and France’s Division 1 Feminene. However women’s teams have felt somewhat sidelined compared to the men’s. Did the Fifa licence impose restrictions in this regard?

“No, I don’t think so,” considers Jackson, before qualifying his answer. ”There’s a difference between maybe restriction and then intent, and I think we are very, very intentional about elevating and accelerating women’s football.

“Candidly, we were not in a position to effectively execute women’s club football in our titles until about two years ago. So we undertook a really really deep body of research to educate our organisation, from our engineers and codebase technicians all the way through to our marketing organisation and commercial to make people understand that women’s football is different.

“It’s different physically, it’s different from a business model perspective, it’s different culturally, we had to truly and deeply understand that before we could ever hope to execute it well. And from the moment that we executed that body of work, and we felt like we were educated enough to be able to authentically deliver women’s football, from that moment, we’ve seen tremendous success.”

“You can expect women’s football to play an increasingly visible role in our platform moving forward,” he continues, “but Fifa weren’t preventing us from executing that at all. I just think there wasn’t necessarily an intent to accelerate to quite the same pace that EA had.

“The one place that there was a little bit of a challenge was in the rules of the physical game, the real world game, around men and women being able to play together. Even within our game today, if you play a friendly, you can’t play Chelsea men against Chelsea women. And that was a stipulation that I think Fifa were keen to maintain. I think in the future, you might see a world where we’re able to democratise our platform a little more, because we now have the freedom to do so.”

Would that include going so far as to introduce female players to the game’s most popular mode, Ultimate Team?

“You might see a lot of experiences that adapt towards allowing women to play on a more level playing field,” is Jackson’s carefully considered response. “I think you’ll see more expansive opportunities for women to be viewed as having exactly the same opportunity in our platform as men’s football previously has.”

And what of Fifa itself? President Gianni Infantino recently confirmed the organisation would look to licence their IP to new publishers, announcing at his re-election in March: “The new Fifa game – the Fifa 25, 26, 27 and so on – will always be the best egame for any girl or boy, we will have news on this very soon.”

The use of terms like “egame” and characterising gamers as young children is perhaps more evidence of the widening gulf that developed between these two once happy bedfellows. Wilson’s leaked comments included a frustrated reference to the Fifa licence restricting EA from trying “different things beyond 11v11”. Given in recent years the franchise has flirted with new gametypes including Fifa 19’s narrative experiment The Journey, and fast-paced, short-sided Futsal-mode Volta, what else does it want to do?

“There’s no world where we want to completely break the cultural fabric of football and take it into a space that feels inauthentic,” Jackson considers. “But we do need at least the creative opportunity to think more expansively about what football could be like. And I think we now have that opportunity because we own our own brand and our own platform.”

EA Sports FC will release later in 2023.
 
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Chris Davies said:


EDIT: Looks like it's behind a paywall. Here's the text from the article:

Few commercial partnerships in global sport have been as long-lasting, influential, or, indeed, lucrative, as that between Fifa and video game publisher EA Sports.

Their first collaboration, 1993’s Fifa International Soccer, timed to mark the following year’s US-hosted World Cup finals, and released on such long-gone gaming platforms as the Commodore Amiga, Sega Mega Drive, and the 3DO, was an unprecedented success, selling some 500,000 copies in the UK in its first month.

Over the course of 30 annual iterations, Fifa, as it’s affectionately known, has become the best-selling video game franchise in the world, amassing total sales of well over 350 million, and contributing the lion’s share of EA Sports’ $7.4 billion earnings in 2022. Its cultural standing has increased exponentially too, to the point where the annual player ratings reveal is as eagerly awaited a moment on the football calendar as the fixtures release.

EA Sports and FIFA’s most recent collaboration, Fifa 23, was the series’ most successful yet, shipping over 10 million units in its first week. It was also their last.

Rumours began circulating in 2021 that EA Sports and Fifa’s relationship had hit the rocks. The New York Times reported Fifa wanted to double the $150 million annual licensing fee EA Sports paid for use of the body’s name and inclusion of the World Cup in its games.

Leaked comments from a company all-hands meeting suggested EA might not be keen on such a deal, CEO Andrew Wilson reportedly telling staff, “basically, what we get from Fifa in a non-World Cup year is the four letters on the front of the box, in a world where most people don’t even see the box anymore because they buy the game digitally.”

In May 2022, Wilson confirmed the split and announced the birth of a new brand: EA Sports FC.

A year on, Telegraph Sport is sitting down with David Jackson, the English-born, Everton-supporting, VP of Brand, known universally to his EA Sports FC colleagues as ‘DJ’, to discuss one of the most significant and challenging rebrands in football history.

If Jackson harbours any remorse about his franchise’s recent conscious uncoupling then it’s extremely well-hidden. Naturally he’s both complementary and respectful about EA Sports’ now ex-partner, reflecting on “an incredibly beneficial two-way relationship”, but tellingly also echoing those leaked Wilson comments by admitting: “we don’t lose anything necessarily from moving in a different direction and having our own IP.”

So, were the reports of Fifa wanting to double its licensing fee accurate?

“It’s definitely one of many considerations that we’ve made,” answers Jackson. “We’re really intentional about working through the data that comes back from these rights holders. Are we getting enough value? Are our fans getting enough value? Are we giving value back? We’re a massive platform to showcase the very best IP in the world of football.

“Money is always going to play a role in any negotiation. And we are not going to shy away from the fact that it did in this case too. But it was far more about the limitations and the restrictions that our rights holder – understandably – places on any partner. And the things that our fans expect from us and will continue to demand from us in the future were unachievable when we didn’t own our own IP.

“If you imagine that you wanted to go build even trivial things like an apparel line, or something slightly more meaningful, like a media platform or a broadcast network, what are you going to call it? Because you can’t call it Fifa. And if you call it EA Sports it infers that it’s probably a bit more expansive than just global football.

“So we’re sort of in this sort of uncanny valley in between not fully wholly owning a football IP, and not being able to rely on a sports IP like EA Sports to be able to talk about football. So it was a natural progression towards owning our own brand. And money wasn’t necessarily the prime factor in our decision.”

There’s a noticeable echo here of another leaked comment attributed to Wilson that the Fifa licence was actually “an impediment” to the videogame’s growth. I ask Jackson what EA Sports can do now that it couldn’t do previously.

“All the while that we were called Fifa, there’s this sort of act of repetition,” he explains, “there’s like an annualised cycle around this game. ‘What did we do last year? And how can we improve this year?’ It’s iterative versus innovative. The mindset shift now, starting with a blank piece of paper and being able to move forward is really, really valuable for us. We are able to now be more expansive about the experiences we offer beyond gaming.

“We truly believe we’re an interactive experiences organisation,” Jackson continues. “That doesn’t have to mean something limited to either a mobile phone and a gaming sense, or a console. We think in the future, we’re going to have the opportunity to expand into more of the ways in which fans engage with football content now, whether that’s broadcast rights and IP, whether that’s media platform and passive forms of entertainment around predictions, live scores, and highlights. That wasn’t necessarily achievable to us when we didn’t own our own IP and it is now.”

If that sounds like a long-term plan then that’s because it is. The first milestone is launching EA Sports FC, or ‘FC’ as EA Sports hopes it will come to be called.

“That was part of the audible design choice that we made,” says Jackson of the naming process, “making sure that it was short and succinct and could be shared around the watercooler or on the playground.”

The game itself is being kept under wraps until a reveal event in Amsterdam in July, and Jackson won’t be drawn on revealing any specific new features. Instead he insists players will recognise pretty much from the off that EA Sports FC is something genuinely new and innovative as opposed to another yearly update with a different name.

One of those innovations could be better integration of the women’s game. EA Sports has championed the women’s game, putting Chelsea forward Sam Kerr on the cover of Fifa 23 alongside Kylian Mbappe, and licensing the UK’s WSL, North America’s NWSL, and France’s Division 1 Feminene. However women’s teams have felt somewhat sidelined compared to the men’s. Did the Fifa licence impose restrictions in this regard?

“No, I don’t think so,” considers Jackson, before qualifying his answer. ”There’s a difference between maybe restriction and then intent, and I think we are very, very intentional about elevating and accelerating women’s football.

“Candidly, we were not in a position to effectively execute women’s club football in our titles until about two years ago. So we undertook a really really deep body of research to educate our organisation, from our engineers and codebase technicians all the way through to our marketing organisation and commercial to make people understand that women’s football is different.

“It’s different physically, it’s different from a business model perspective, it’s different culturally, we had to truly and deeply understand that before we could ever hope to execute it well. And from the moment that we executed that body of work, and we felt like we were educated enough to be able to authentically deliver women’s football, from that moment, we’ve seen tremendous success.”

“You can expect women’s football to play an increasingly visible role in our platform moving forward,” he continues, “but Fifa weren’t preventing us from executing that at all. I just think there wasn’t necessarily an intent to accelerate to quite the same pace that EA had.

“The one place that there was a little bit of a challenge was in the rules of the physical game, the real world game, around men and women being able to play together. Even within our game today, if you play a friendly, you can’t play Chelsea men against Chelsea women. And that was a stipulation that I think Fifa were keen to maintain. I think in the future, you might see a world where we’re able to democratise our platform a little more, because we now have the freedom to do so.”

Would that include going so far as to introduce female players to the game’s most popular mode, Ultimate Team?

“You might see a lot of experiences that adapt towards allowing women to play on a more level playing field,” is Jackson’s carefully considered response. “I think you’ll see more expansive opportunities for women to be viewed as having exactly the same opportunity in our platform as men’s football previously has.”

And what of Fifa itself? President Gianni Infantino recently confirmed the organisation would look to licence their IP to new publishers, announcing at his re-election in March: “The new Fifa game – the Fifa 25, 26, 27 and so on – will always be the best egame for any girl or boy, we will have news on this very soon.”

The use of terms like “egame” and characterising gamers as young children is perhaps more evidence of the widening gulf that developed between these two once happy bedfellows. Wilson’s leaked comments included a frustrated reference to the Fifa licence restricting EA from trying “different things beyond 11v11”. Given in recent years the franchise has flirted with new gametypes including Fifa 19’s narrative experiment The Journey, and fast-paced, short-sided Futsal-mode Volta, what else does it want to do?

“There’s no world where we want to completely break the cultural fabric of football and take it into a space that feels inauthentic,” Jackson considers. “But we do need at least the creative opportunity to think more expansively about what football could be like. And I think we now have that opportunity because we own our own brand and our own platform.”

EA Sports FC will release later in 2023.
Click to expand...
Nothing about this sounds positive for the offline single player experience. To me, it seems like EA might be investing in making it more like Fortnite, a destination for more than just playing a game, live football, livestreams, other content they couldn’t do with the FIFA name.
 
Topaz said:
That makes perfect sense as most of their games under EA Sports have more resembles as a casino game than a sports game. Maybe it should be called EA Casino to reflect the brand more accurately.
Click to expand...
I saw people saying about setting themselves up to be brought…. Just think if a P2W company even worse than EA brought them, I reckon things could get *even* worse. Start a crowdfunding campaign to buy the Sports arm? 😂.
If you asked me when I was playing old FIFA, what it could be like in 2023, I would’ve imagined a brilliantly presented game with full of immersion features and gameplay, and now… it’s turning into a “platform” that’s already a casino for kids ew.
 
HeWillKnockFourTimes said:
I saw people saying about setting themselves up to be brought…. Just think if a P2W company even worse than EA brought them, I reckon things could get *even* worse. Start a crowdfunding campaign to buy the Sports arm? 😂.
If you asked me when I was playing old FIFA, what it could be like in 2023, I would’ve imagined a brilliantly presented game with full of immersion features and gameplay, and now… it’s turning into a “platform” that’s already a casino for kids ew.
Click to expand...
I mean we did evolve, just backwards.
 
Chris Davies said:


I mean, if that "touch the ball in shorter time intervals" line is true...

... it's going to be even more stupid than this? Seriously?

Click to expand...

What continues in that sentence feels even more ridiculous and bothering: "... which leads to faster movements." FIFA 23 is already too fast, too laser guided, too "capture the flag" situation from point A 🔁 B. How much faster they want gameplay to be when moving, dribbling, and sprinting? They prioritize speed and reaction at the cost of what should be common sense about football: playstyle formations, tactics, positioning, flanking, development of individual players, risks during contacts, aspects that can create spectacle and satisfaction. It's mind boggling seeing how this game is directed by some individuals that doesn't have a clue of what means football. I can imagine their brainstorming sessions :PUKE: on the chalkboard meeting room:

How can we start "fresh" and develop soccer in our new "brand"? Well, users should have the ability to ground pass to that teammate from the opposite side of the field as fast as they can without being interrupted, then he can do some fancy street juggling with the ball going as fast as he can through that non existent defense being there just as some decorum, then again without being interrupted he should just smash that ball on the top corner to look cool on our enhanced nets. After that, the other guy (retarded or not) should do the same. Both back and forth during an entire match unlocking even faster reactions via pack openings...
 
It's horrible, isn't it? Surely there has to be some element of observational skill even in an esports environment. Timing, inertia, and attributes are what make dribbling rewarding for both the gamer and the viewers.

A world where anybody can do anything with no skill required isn't a good one. Imagine a racing game where you never have to break or slow down and timely hitting that accelerator when cornering or a fighting game where you never have to block or parry because these strategies are considered boring or not exciting to perform.

That's how you balance a damn game!
 
Paul-v said:
This is also highlighted further with modding. Most idiots who mod their game actually want mOrE graphics or faces or leagues or kits rather than actual improvements to the game.
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A bit harsh that Paul, how did you know what I liked? ;)
 
Its mad how it all went full circle, huh?
We had Kick Off 2 and the likes - crazy fast arcade football games that we played as kids.

Then it slowly started getting more and more serious up until some genius somewhere said - "Hold Up! Its getting too difficult! Kids cant play this!"

And now we basically have Kick Off 2 in a nice and shiny graphical wrapper.

And I honestly could not give a single fuck at this stage, but one thing really pisses me off - when, come August, they post these clips, blatantly lying how realistic this next upcoming edition will be.
Seriously - how fucking dare you??

Just call it as it is - we have Kick Off 2 in a shiny wrapper, with dumb fucking AI, blind goalkeepers and rocket shots, so no kids got frustrated that they cant score 10 goals per match.
We rather die than see 0-0 result! Leave shit like this to grampa-gamers!
 
I've kind of changed my mind on FUT. My kids play FUT and don't pay a single dime. They learn about players they may have never found on career mode, and are constantly engaged in the real sport as a result. We talk about transfers, they test sliders and are overall very grounded in their decisions. Their ages are 8 and 10. They also play in pro camera mode somehow!
 
Marlon Anthony said:
It's horrible, isn't it? Surely there has to be some element of observational skill even in an esports environment. Timing, inertia, and attributes are what make dribbling rewarding for both the gamer and the viewers.

A world where anybody can do anything with no skill required isn't a good one. Imagine a racing game where you never have to break or slow down and timely hitting that accelerator when cornering or a fighting game where you never have to block or parry because these strategies are considered boring or not exciting to perform.

That's how you balance a damn game!
Click to expand...

Exactly. That's why FIFA will never be able to compete against Rocket League(that actually involves skill). FIFA's dribbling is very RNG based.
 
Off topic, does Fifa 25 (released in 2024) will be made by another studio? I read Gianni Infantino speak about how the best football game will be named Fifa. Of course his opinionion about "best" is not relevant here but he actually said that we have new player on the market, 2K maybe?
 
I don’t know. Consider that EA and Konami hold the rights for most of the leagues out there, so a competitor would have to have either few teams singularly licensed and/or many fake ones (maybe with real players thanks to fifpro I assume).
It could also be difficult for a new developer to enter the console market straight away with a game that’s not an utter mess or blatantly unfinished (I don’t think Gianni would like that).

Well, maybe we’ll just have something different like FUT-like mobile games (maybe with rolling updates like eFootball, not necessarily released yearly and with no real teams but just fictional teams to create from scratch with pre-made kit and crest templates to colour) plus “themed” games with bells and whistles (hopefully full fledged with qualifiers and all the teams with proper licences, not half-arsed DLCs like Konami did for the Euro and EA have been doing for the World Cups) when a World Cup hits for current gen consoles and maybe PCs.
 
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Matt10 said:
I've kind of changed my mind on FUT. My kids play FUT and don't pay a single dime. They learn about players they may have never found on career mode, and are constantly engaged in the real sport as a result. We talk about transfers, they test sliders and are overall very grounded in their decisions. Their ages are 8 and 10. They also play in pro camera mode somehow!
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I friggin love this. I enjoy fut as well. Have never paid one dime either. Im a bit older too
 
*aLe said:
I don’t know. Consider that EA and Konami hold the rights for most of the leagues out there, so a competitor would have to have either few teams singularly licensed and/or many fake ones (maybe with real players thanks to fifpro I assume).
It could also be difficult for a new developer to enter the console market straight away with a game that’s not an utter mess or blatantly unfinished (I don’t think Gianni would like that).

Well, maybe we’ll just have something different like FUT-like mobile games (maybe with rolling updates like eFootball, not necessarily released yearly and with no real teams but just fictional teams to create from scratch with pre-made kit and crest templates to colour) plus “themed” games with bells and whistles (hopefully full fledged with qualifiers and all the teams with proper licences, not half-arsed DLCs like Konami did for the Euro and EA have been doing for the World Cups) when a World Cup hits for current gen consoles and maybe PCs.
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Maybe they will go with international teams first becouse it's Fifa? See how game is percieved by the auditorium and then continue to expand with leagues. I am sure if it's a solid base for football game most of the football lovers will play that instead of garbage games we have right now. Of course that is big IF. It's a shame that most popular sport in the world isn't good represented in the game in 2023.
 
As much as I appreciate Ea’s efforts between 2008 and 2018, at this stage nothing else would satisfy me more than seeing this franchise take a huge hit and fail big time for whatever the reason. I have zero expectations for the new game because I know it won’t be catered for players like myself so I really hope they get somehow punished for making the game more arcadey year after year.
 
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