Electronic Arts has been using the FIFA name for their football games for years, but there’s a good chance they’ll get away from it with the upcoming installment. This is because FIFA wants a high amount for the use of the name, where EA does not like it.
Negotiations are said to have stalled a bit, so EA subsequently held an internal meeting in October last year. The details of this meeting have now been shared with VGC and it turns out that EA isn’t too concerned about the chance of losing the FIFA license.
The CEO of the publisher, Andrew Wilson, would have indicated that it concerns four letters on the cover, where many people nowadays purchase the games digitally. So for visibility between the games on the shelves it shouldn’t matter much anymore.
“I’m going to be more open… more open than I’ve been with the outside world. We’ve had a great relationship with FIFA over the past 30-odd years. We’ve created billions in value… it’s just huge. We’ve created one of the biggest entertainment properties on the planet.
I would argue – and this may be a little biased – that the FIFA brand has more meaning as a video game than it does a governing body of soccer. We don’t take that for granted and we try not to be arrogant. We’ve worked really hard to try and make FIFA understand what we need for the future.
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 addition, Wilson also raises the question whether it is wise to continue with the FIFA license, because it sometimes forms an obstacle in a creative sense. He hereby outlines an example that FIFA is linked to Adidas, which means that EA cannot work with other brands in the game. And that is at odds with what the community wants and that is more variety in that respect.
“As we’ve looked to the future we want to grow the franchise, and ironically the FIFA licence has actually been an impediment to that. Our players tell us they want more cultural and commercial brands relevant to them in their markets, more deeply embedded in the game… brands like Nike. But because FIFA has a relationship with Adidas, we are not able to do that.
Our players tell us they want more modes of play, different things beyond 11v11 and different types of gameplay. I would tell you, it’s been a fight to get FIFA to acknowledge the types of things that we want to create, because they say our licence only covers certain categories.
Our players want us to expand into the digital ecosystem more broadly… our fans are telling us they want us to go and participate in that space. Our FIFA licence has actually precluded us from doing a lot of this stuff. Again, FIFA is just the name on the box, but they’ve precluded our ability to be able to branch into the areas that players want.”
In other words, this sounds like FIFA trying really hard on the most finicky things. Sounds like the franchise is better off without FIFA as a brand name than with it. Whether it will come to that remains to be seen. What’s your opinion?
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