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EA Has To Get Rights To "Each And Every Individual Athlete" For NCAA Return, Says Lawyer

Bullet Club

Banned
EA Has To Get Rights To "Each And Every Individual Athlete" For NCAA Return, Says Lawyer

In case you haven't heard, the NCAA is on its way to letting players make money off of their own likenesses, something the organization has been against since the NCAA first started being a thing. The rule against paying athletes combined with a lawsuit against the NCAA in 2014 (which claimed that NCAA games illegally profited off of students' identities) has kept EA from making any NCAA games since NCAA Football 2014.

Now that athletes can be paid, EA can start making NCAA games again, right? Well, yes, but... there's a whole lot of athletes that they need to pay and there's no single organization that can grant EA the rights to all of them.

"If Electronic Arts decides to bring back a college sports video game, it will hit a roadblock, because it has to get permission from each and every individual athlete, since there is no larger union/organization to negotiate with," said Video Game Lawyer Stephen McArthur in a statement.

The NBA, NFL, MLB, and all other professional sports organizations have players' unions that video game companies can make deals with. These deals give them the ability to have every single athlete as part of the game. No such organization exists for NCAA players. Unless that changes, that means that EA would have to work out deals with every single athlete individually. Since there are around 30,000 athletes in Division I NCAA football alone, that seems like a tall order.

To give an example that long-time video game players might be familiar with, old NBA games did not feature Michael Jordan because he chose not to take part in the National Basketball Players Association's licensing agreement. NBA games had the rights to all the other players, but not Michael Jordan -- the only games that did feature Jordan, such as NBA Street and Space Jam, had to make deals directly with him.

For the NCAA, EA would have to do that for literally everyone. That's not the only issue. McArthur says that EA would need to get University logo rights, conference logo rights, music rights, and more.

"There are so many different rights owners involved in making collegiate athletics video games," McArthur said. "An organization will need to spring into effect to aggregate the negotiating for the rights of each player so that video games don't need to independently negotiate the rights of hundreds or even thousands of separate players."

It's likely that a union will eventually sprout up to handle these issues. Until that happens, dreams of an NCAA game will most likely be delayed.

Source: The Gamer
 

Pallas

Member
I don’t see that happening, maybe in a few years college athletes will get unionized, then maybe it’ll be possible.
 

Bluecondor

Member
While this article is technically correct today, it seems logical that NCAA athletes will become part of collective licensing agreements through some means that will be developed. For example - this article on pay for Olympic athletes mentions how certain Olympic teams get corporate sponsorships in return for advertising. I can imagine some sort of collective agreement for likenesses/licensing:

 
Can they not just randomly generate each player on every team? Say the Qb for Michigan is a 6’5 white kid with the jersey #8. The Game then is programmed to create the opposite type of player (6’2 Hawaiian with #12). Could this not be a viable option, or am I missing something?
 

Fox Mulder

Member
Madden currently sucks and this would too. Even if they did all the work to get student player rights, it would still lack features and basic football 101 gameplay that ps2 games had.

I still play ncaa 14 today, it’s not the same EA though.
 
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Nobody_Important

“Aww, it’s so...average,” she said to him in a cold brick of passion
How about EA just tries to figure out how to make a good football game period before they start trying to make another franchise?
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
College football has its issues. You have college coaches who make more than the professors do. Then you have the players who don't make any money from playing. The school makes more money off its sports division than the actual education it offers. The whole situation is a mess. NCAA was always a fun football game. I think it would be a nightmare to have to work at making another NCAA game. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
 

KOMANI

KOMANI
This is what killed EA’s boxing game. Acquiring licenses is tricky. With PES getting exclusive teams, this year has become a licensing nightmare for EA.
 

DanielsM

Banned
I don’t see that happening, maybe in a few years college athletes will get unionized, then maybe it’ll be possible.
Unless they are considered "employees", which is where the schools (ncaa) are trying to draw the line by removing the rules for outside income - there is nothing to unionize.

Top players could ban together and market their rights as a group for more bang for the buck though.

This is exactly why I didn’t want the players to get paid. I agree with what Tim Tebow said.

They're not getting paid per se, they can now (or soon) receive outside payments without involvement of the schools.
 
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Tesseract

Banned
college industry is a fucking mess, from someone who was supposed to go all the way but got forcibly stopped because of injuries sustained as a senior, it's vampires all the way to the top
 

Daniel Thomas MacInnes

GAF's Resident Saturn Omnibus
Translation: no more licensed NCAA sports videogames.

Better to go back to the good 'ole days of sports games with fake teams and players. Just add in a player edit feature and you'll be fine. Anything's better than the monstrous train wreck that we have today, where one publisher owns the rights to everything and only one title per sport is ever released.

Of course, the gamers won't touch any sports games that don't have official licenses, so there's the rub. It's a bit of a Catch-22.
 

Digity

Member
What exactly was the appeal of the college games? Were they actually any different than their professional counterparts? From the outside they just seem like reskins.
 
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chillinggamers_

Neo Member
Unless they are considered "employees", which is where the schools (ncaa) are trying to draw the line by removing the rules for outside income - there is nothing to unionize.

Top players could ban together and market their rights as a group for more bang for the buck though.



They're not getting paid per se, they can now (or soon) receive outside payments without involvement of the schools.


Their likeness werent used in the NCAA Football series. Unless you want to argue stats, which is kind of a stretch. Ed O’Bannon is just a cunt who didn’t pan out and was looking for an excuse to be relevant.
 

daveonezero

Banned
Yeah iirc they used to just have random numbers and players anyways and no names when you played NCAA football.

The cool thing about the NCAA football games was developing your program and recruiting. So after 4 seasons everyone is cycled through anyways so none of the players were real anymore.
 
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Fox Mulder

Member
Their likeness werent used in the NCAA Football series. Unless you want to argue stats, which is kind of a stretch. Ed O’Bannon is just a cunt who didn’t pan out and was looking for an excuse to be relevant.

They did put in effort for accurate rosters though. Rosters were generic names but a guy like Tebow had his exact skills and general appearance.

The NCAA has kept anyone from licensing games since the lawsuit and EA just goes and gets a license for the couple of colleges in the Madden storyline mode thing.


What exactly was the appeal of the college games? Were they actually any different than their professional counterparts? From the outside they just seem like reskins.

College football is just different than the nfl. I have never liked Madden but still play NCAA football 14 today.
 
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NickFire

Member
How about EA just tries to figure out how to make a good football game period before they start trying to make another franchise?
Madden is actually pretty good. Not much changed since last year, and there is certainly plenty of room for improvement. But the general gameplay is pretty fun. That all said, EA treats its Madden audience with utter contempt on Ultimate Team. I have invested way more than I care to admit buying packs this year, but EA does everything it can to make those prior purchases become irrelevant over time unless you keep spending. Next year I will be boycotting the game again out of principle. Not the first time.

As for the original topic, I have no pity for anyone who wants to make an NCAA game and needs to pay the players to use their likeness. There's nothing fair, IMO, about making millions off of student athletes while they get peanuts back. Adding in the age restrictions for going pro, and it starts to resemble forced labor with the almost unpaid employee taking all the risks as injuries can derail their future. Allowing them to profit off their likeness being used, and making conglomerates like EA deal directly with the athletes in some fashion, is only right.

But that said, does EA really need to include player names and likenesses in the games? If they have the NCAA license, team names, etc., just use random names and faces, and make the stats appropriate to actual teams (good luck though, as the best enter the drafts during the dev cycles). I'm guessing the real reluctance is the greater difficulty selling loot boxes (cough card packs cough) for leagues when the best players will be gone each year.
 
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Futaleufu

Member
This is what killed EA’s boxing game. Acquiring licenses is tricky. With PES getting exclusive teams, this year has become a licensing nightmare for EA.

Indeed, EA UFC is a thing because they only have to deal with the UFC, which IIRC forces fighters to give their likeness while under contract.
 
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LOLCats

Banned
about damn time. They had been profiting off of those athletes for years. Just imagine your likeness in a video game and you never getting a dime of the money.. just think about that.
 
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dorkimoe

Member
i remember when michael jordan wasnt in any of the NBA live games growing up lol

But they just need to do a union
 
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Digity

Member
College football is just different than the nfl. I have never liked Madden but still play NCAA football 14 today.
Still the same sport though, so again I ask what is actually different? If you like one but not the other, what is it you like about it that the other doesn’t have or do?
 

Fox Mulder

Member
Still the same sport though, so again I ask what is actually different? If you like one but not the other, what is it you like about it that the other doesn’t have or do?

ncaa football is a different experience than the nfl. The games reflect that.

There’s different offenses, defenses, presentation. and atmosphere. I prefer the coaching dynasty mode of building a college program instead of the franchise mode in the nfl. NCAA football is also just bigger with 100 more teams and stadiums.
 

Pallas

Member
Unless they are considered "employees", which is where the schools (ncaa) are trying to draw the line by removing the rules for outside income - there is nothing to unionize.

Top players could ban together and market their rights as a group for more bang for the buck though.



They're not getting paid per se, they can now (or soon) receive outside payments without involvement of the schools.

That’s what I suspect might happen leading up to it in a few years.
 
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