EA has revealed they will be bringing college football back into their roster of sports titles, but they won’t have the NCAA Football name. Instead, they’ll be known as EA Sports College Football and the first game in the franchise is currently in development.
The company has teamed up with CLC to become the exclusive developer of college football simulation games. The license gives them access to over 100 institutions with their logos, stadiums, uniforms, and gameday tradition. However, the license does not give them the rights to include specific players, so there won’t be any student-athlete names, images or likenesses. This is likely due to previous disputes over the use of player likenesses in the NCAA Football games, something that led to a $60 million settlement in 2015.
The future of college football games had been in jeopardy since 2013 when NCAA revealed they wouldn’t be renewing their license with the publisher. This was again due to “the current business climate and costs of litigation”. At the time, EA Sports’ Executive Vice President Andrew House promised they would “continue to develop and publish college football games” without the NCAA trademark, but after NCAA Football 14 was released, nothing else materialized.
This was compounded in 2016 by a statement from EA that they had “no new plans or announcements to make” regarding college football games. Their (at the time) Chief Competitive Officer Peter Moore later teased the franchise could return, but it has taken far longer than anyone anticipated for it to do so and it instead became one of the most fan-requested games. EA SPORTS EVP and GM Cam Weber said:
We’ve heard from the millions of passionate fans requesting the return of college football video games. We love the energy, tradition and pageantry of college football and I am beyond thrilled to say we are back in development. We have a lot of really exciting work ahead of us, and a great team that is eager to bring a new game to players in the next couple of years.
As his statement explains, the new EA Sports College Football may take a while to appear, maybe even as late as 2023. EA has promised to reveal more about the game and its potential launch in the future.
