EA Sports and Planned Obsolescence - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 103

versions of itself. The exclusivity of Madden NFL 's design extends the
benefi ts EA reaps from licenses granted to sports games, as the necessity
of holding a license to produce simulation-style gaming shapes the dis-
course of sports games. Everyone may know there will be another version
of the game coming, but the competition for licenses means that “there
are very few instances where there are multiple publishers all fi ghting over
the same sport and all are being successful.” 21 In protecting their games
with licensing rights, EA Sports is able to fetishize the value of licenses
and push out competitors, which means their games increasingly compete
with older versions of EA games, rather than external competition. Exclu-
sive licenses compound these benefi ts, as they eliminate competition for
an extended period of time, making another company's resurgence in the
market more dii cult because they have not been making a game dedi-
cated to that sport and would have to build their game from scratch.
One of the key pieces for any game's release is hitting the appropriate
launch window for the product. Programming and producing the games
is a tricky business and typical games take two or three years to code,
but sports games need to ship at least every year. 22 An annual release is
expected for sports games, even though industry experts believe that “rush-
ing most franchises to get an annual release impacts series quality in the
long run.” 23 Further complicating matters for sports games is that they have
to hit a precise launch window to be successful. Although many games seek
to release in the winter holiday season, should issues arise in programming
or testing the game, the launch date can be moved back. Sports games, on
the other hand, are in a position where the timing of the real world season
on which they are based drives a huge part of game consumption. This
poses some advantages, as the occurrence of a major soccer tournament
can drive sales of FIFA Soccer months after the game's initial launch, but if
the window is missed, bad things happen.
EA Sports suf ered from this with their planned NBA release in 2010
when testing showed a number of bugs in NBA Elite 11 that made it
an inferior option to the competing NBA2K11 . With NBA Elite 11 , EA
Sports sought to reinvent their NBA title, making substantial changes
to their game engine in an attempt to “fundamentally innovate,” which
required a “complete rewrite of the technology.” 24 EA CEO Jon Ricci-
tiello argued that EA Sports was faced with a choice: ship a second tier
game that would lose in the marketplace and cement “a reputation for
being one to ship secondary sports titles” or continue production and
delay the launch, “but when you look at the data, typically somewhere
between 85 and 90 per cent of basketball games ship between launch
date and the All-Star game so we would have been competing for, what,
half of the last 10 per cent?” 25 Compounding the issue is the fact that the
continued debugging of NBA Elite 11 would mean that the development
cycle for the next year's game would be even shorter. As a result, EA chose
to shelve the product, stopping its release and writing of the work on the