6 ms·

When Madden NFL Killed NFL 2K

58 points by vezycash 8y ago

mozumder 8y ago
NFL2K was easily the best football game. The controls were so much better than Madden. Something about Sega games that made them so easy to get into. I could never get into Madden. On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked. So good..
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  NFL Blitz was also a fantastic game of that era. It’s a shame that sports games all basically are strangled into a mold these days.
  - camhenlin 8y ago
    Yeah, totally agreed. Blitz was great because it didn’t try to be too realistic and had a lot of silly and ridiculous stuff, which made it a lot of fun. I don’t like or watch sports, but I did have fun playing Blitz on the N64 with my friends. Games like Madden take themselves too seriously and (IMO of course) only seem to be good for actual sports fans
    - bena 8y ago
      Blitz knew exactly what it wanted to be: arcade football. A sort of spiritual successor to games like Mutant League.
  - trophycase 8y ago
    Yeah NFL Blitz was awesome and still play it with my brother to this day.
  - dopeboy 8y ago
    I bought Blitz for the PC and remember playing it using my Microsoft Sidewinder joystick. Sometimes I'd invite my friend over and we'd play against each other on the same computer. He'd get the keyboard and I'd get the joystick. There are some retro venues that still have it. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to find. I wonder if it can be played on Dolphin.
    - pathartl 8y ago
      The PC version will only play on older systems, but it's seriously worth it. Even in just a XP VM. It's easily the best version of the game.
- bb88 8y ago
  > On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked. If you played as Bill Belichick, could you cheat? /s
  - mozumder 8y ago
    As a Patriots hater, I appreciated this.
- bena 8y ago
  The VMU was novel and criminally underused. I think part of the problem was the novelty. No one knew what to do with it. I remember Resident Evil displaying your health as a heartbeat thing. But that wasn't as useful since it required you to be constantly shifting your focus.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    It also didn’t come with the Dreamcast, so no guarantee that a player would have one.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  The whole aesthetic of 2K was great. They really made it look like an ESPN broadcast, complete with the announcers. I remember once my dad was confused as to why the Broncos were playing on a Wednesday night. Was legitimately surprised when I told him it was a game.
pdwetz 8y ago
I still miss Front Page Sports Football from the 90s. While we owned a couple of different versions, the early one that had the most play time for us was completely unlicensed, so we made up names for all of the teams. It was a really nice balance of sim, play designer, and arcade football. My brother and I each had a team and played through multiple seasons. If memory serves, I tanked the end of one season to ensure the #1 overall pick in the next draft. Unfortunately, with our setup only one person could play at a time so we had to sim any games our teams played each other (including a championship game or two).
- ydt 8y ago
  I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. We both agreed that to date, it was the most fun either of us have had with a computer football game. Watching your fictional players develop,get hurt etc added an rpg-like element that was addictive. I am surprised and disappointed no one has made a comparable modern version.
  - danbolt 8y ago
    I bet the next developer that makes a sports game with a Fire-Emblem spin (character relationship elements, individual personalities) will make a solid amount of money.
slg 8y ago
The shock waves of this deal basically killed all competition in sport video games. When I was a kid there were usually 3 or 4 games in each of the big pro sports. Today there is really only one viable franchise per sport (even though I believe all the exclusive licenses have since expired). The market for these games is bigger than ever with EA bringing in almost $1 billion per year from their Madden and FIFA franchises. However the cost of licensing and the threat of another exclusivity bidding war means the barrier to entry and long term risk of creating a new franchise is sadly too high to get any serious competition.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Isn't Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer still kicking around? You're essentially right otherwise though.
  - modeless 8y ago
    Not for long: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/16/pes-2019-champions-league-fifa-heartbreak/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/16/pes-2019-champions-leagu...
    - mnm1 8y ago
      PES / WE has never had official licenses except for a few clubs here and there that change every season and no one cares because it's simply superior to FIFA in every other way. People have been playing this game for over two decades without official licenses. Losing the CL license will not affect the game much. EDIT: Also, there are community patches with all the kits, at least for PS4 / PC.
  - IkmoIkmo 8y ago
    Dying a slow death. Sports is all about the stories, the personalities, the names, the drama, the tribalism. If you can't license the big teams or big competitions and have to rename everything (which PES is famous for) you just can't compete with the same feeling. And game quality wise they don't stand out anymore like they did for a few years to compensate. I used to play sports games 90% singleplayer or with friends in the same room. The fact you had PES and your friend had FIFA didn't matter much, even if one game sells 20% and the other 80% of marketshare, they can co-exist because when you play together, it's on one machine, the controls are just slightly different but they have quicksettings for those. Now that it's all gone online, network effects take over. If you want to multiplayer you both need the same game, and the dominant market share game will thrive while the rest basically offers singleplayer only + multiplayer mostly against a small community of mostly strangers. That's also partly why PES hasn't been doing very well the past few games I think.
rc_mob 8y ago
Yeah this ended any competition in NFL video games. Madden got a monopoly basically.
nkozyra 8y ago
Madden is fascinating to me because despite widespread user dissatisfaction with the game year-in, year-out, its users treat it like a necessity. I guess that's a monopoly in action. There is space for a competitive product, but it would need to be completely unlicensed. Without licensing, you'd need a simple way to customize rules, teams, players, etc. EAs NCAA series got around player issues in a similar way. If that customization were fostered, you could have a football game that with a few clicks was a better Madden and/or NCAA series. You'd just need to trade your licensing budget for a legal one.
- slg 8y ago
  You might notice that the NCAA series doesn't exist anymore and that is partly because that plausible deniability of using the community to circumvent licensing rules can only go so far.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    I think that's (a small) part of it. The surface reason is that EA did the same thing for a long time, creating players that looked like their real life counterparts with their real life attributes and real life numbers, etc. That's what bit them. You're really going to be hamstrung fighting an open-world, modifiable game unless you're showing obvious negligence in policing it.
    - slg 8y ago
      There would be numerous problems with 100% made up teams and players that would make it too risky for any big developer to attempt. 1. It would be hard to market without a single recognizable face or team. 2. It would be hostile to casual/novice users who couldn't play the game at its full potential out of the box. 3. It would be hard to create the online and esport modes that other sports games thrive on as you couldn't allow those custom rosters in competitive modes.
      - nkozyra 8y ago
        1. Absolutely. It would require some sort of viral approach. You won't win with traditional advertising. 2. Maybe. To be fair, I think the approach from point #1 would always come with an implicit :wink wink, nudge nudge:. 3. I'm not sure you couldn't allow it so much as you would be expected to respond to DMCA/etc in reasonable fashion.
Yhippa 8y ago
NFL 2K was the last big step change in football video games. You could put me on a desert island and I wouldn't miss Madden '18 one bit. Actually I bought Madden '18 which is the first time I've bought a football game in a long time. Madden Ultimate Team is pushed so hard in that game. It's terrible. And people who dump a ton of money into it...you can't even take it into the next season with you. One genre I'll really miss which will never come back are the NCAA Football and Basketball games. Understandably so.
segmondy 8y ago
This can be broken, make a customizable game. Players can name their teams, name the players, name the city, load custom jerseys, load different faces/skin. Let the underground and players build their own player. Make the game player much better.
- bena 8y ago
  This could work provided there was a dedicated enough userbase in the early adopters who had the drive and dedication to create the current league. Then when/if the game gets popular enough, there should be enough people to make keeping up trivial.
  - segmondy 8y ago
    You can fake the userbase. ;-)
    - bena 8y ago
      I mean, you could do all the work yourself
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  This is exactly what's happening with Pro Evolution Soccer.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  They tried. It doesn't work. People want the license.
b3b0p 8y ago
This reminds me, I actually still play Tecmo Super Bowl and actually prefer it over Madden. There is a large fan community and they put out a ROM patch with updated rosters every year [0]. The same for NHL Hockey '94 [1]. [0] http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/550-tecmo-super-bowl-2018-presented-by-tecmobowlorg/ http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/550-tecmo-super-bowl-2018-pr... [1] http://www.nhl94.com http://www.nhl94.com
danso 8y ago
The source podcast ("Madden's Game, by 30 for 30) is itself very interesting for covering the development of the Madden games. Gets into great technical detail, such as how Madden refused to put his name on the game until developers could figure out how to make the game (in the 80s) have 11 vs. 11 players, as opposed to 7 vs. 7. Development stretched past 4 years and Madden's first game was predicted to be a financial failure. https://30for30podcasts.com/episodes/maddens-game/ https://30for30podcasts.com/episodes/maddens-game/
hatchoo 8y ago
I am not American but I gained an appreciation for American Football when I started playing NFL 2k when it came out for the Dreamcast. I continued buying the game when it was out for the PS2 and was sad when that exclusive license thing was announced. I was looking forward to the day when the license expired but sadly that day never came. One thing I also miss is the 2k College Hoops game. It was like playing NBA 2kx except that the rosters didn't matter because they were all randomly generated.
bobbles 8y ago
Pretty telling excerpt of the business BS going on from Wikipedia: ESPN NFL 2K5 was the first in the 2K series priced at $19.99 the day it shipped, much lower than market leader Madden NFL at $49.99. This greatly reduced Madden sales that year; one EA Sports developer recalled that "[i]t scared the hell out of us".[1] EA reduced Madden NFL 2005's price to $29.95. In December 2004 EA Sports acquired an exclusive rights agreement with the NFL and NFLPA to be the sole creator of NFL video games.[2] The deal terminated 2K Sports production of any further NFL games. The ensuing season, Madden 2006, saw pricing returned to the $49.99 MSRP. In December 2010, a U.S. district court judge certified a class action anti-trust lawsuit against Electronic Arts for anti-competitive practices to proceed.[3] Electronic Arts settled the class action suit in July 2012 for $27 million, and retained its exclusive NFL license.[4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_NFL_2K5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_NFL_2K5
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  I remember when this happened when I was just a kid of maybe 10 or 11. Around the time this was happening, you still had NFL blitz, street, fever, QB club, etc all duking it out for king of the sports games, especially. It was a time before social media, so we only really heard rumors about what happened. We all began to hate EA, even back then. We knew it was about money. 2k6 wasnt perfect and it was clunky at times, but it was way more cost effective to play, considering how much you had to pay for a new roster every year
jdhn 8y ago
Reading this thread is such a trip down nostalgia lane. NFL 2K (or maybe 2K1) was my first football game ever, and I have such good memories of playing it with my friends. Pity it had to die an early death, just like the Dreamcast.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Last season should have been a good one for me-- I'm a Vikings fan. But since the NFL became embroiled in politics, I quit watching-- and found I was fine without it. I look forward to more free time again this year. I see where soccer (football to a lot of the world) is picking up a little more interest in the US. Maybe that'll be a better way to get my sporting fix.
spiritcat 8y ago
:shakes fist vigorously:

58 points by vezycash 8y ago

NFL2K was easily the best football game. The controls were so much better than Madden. Something about Sega games that made them so easy to get into. I could never get into Madden. On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked. So good..

godzillabrennus 8y ago
NFL Blitz was also a fantastic game of that era. It’s a shame that sports games all basically are strangled into a mold these days.
- camhenlin 8y ago
  Yeah, totally agreed. Blitz was great because it didn’t try to be too realistic and had a lot of silly and ridiculous stuff, which made it a lot of fun. I don’t like or watch sports, but I did have fun playing Blitz on the N64 with my friends. Games like Madden take themselves too seriously and (IMO of course) only seem to be good for actual sports fans
  - bena 8y ago
    Blitz knew exactly what it wanted to be: arcade football. A sort of spiritual successor to games like Mutant League.
- trophycase 8y ago
  Yeah NFL Blitz was awesome and still play it with my brother to this day.
- dopeboy 8y ago
  I bought Blitz for the PC and remember playing it using my Microsoft Sidewinder joystick. Sometimes I'd invite my friend over and we'd play against each other on the same computer. He'd get the keyboard and I'd get the joystick. There are some retro venues that still have it. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to find. I wonder if it can be played on Dolphin.
  - pathartl 8y ago
    The PC version will only play on older systems, but it's seriously worth it. Even in just a XP VM. It's easily the best version of the game.
bb88 8y ago
> On the Dreamcast where it launched, you could pick plays on your controller's LCD display, making sure your opponent never saw what play you picked. If you played as Bill Belichick, could you cheat? /s
- mozumder 8y ago
  As a Patriots hater, I appreciated this.
bena 8y ago
The VMU was novel and criminally underused. I think part of the problem was the novelty. No one knew what to do with it. I remember Resident Evil displaying your health as a heartbeat thing. But that wasn't as useful since it required you to be constantly shifting your focus.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  It also didn’t come with the Dreamcast, so no guarantee that a player would have one.
Karunamon 8y ago
The whole aesthetic of 2K was great. They really made it look like an ESPN broadcast, complete with the announcers. I remember once my dad was confused as to why the Broncos were playing on a Wednesday night. Was legitimately surprised when I told him it was a game.

pdwetz 8y ago

I still miss Front Page Sports Football from the 90s. While we owned a couple of different versions, the early one that had the most play time for us was completely unlicensed, so we made up names for all of the teams. It was a really nice balance of sim, play designer, and arcade football. My brother and I each had a team and played through multiple seasons. If memory serves, I tanked the end of one season to ensure the #1 overall pick in the next draft. Unfortunately, with our setup only one person could play at a time so we had to sim any games our teams played each other (including a championship game or two).

ydt 8y ago
I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. We both agreed that to date, it was the most fun either of us have had with a computer football game. Watching your fictional players develop,get hurt etc added an rpg-like element that was addictive. I am surprised and disappointed no one has made a comparable modern version.
- danbolt 8y ago
  I bet the next developer that makes a sports game with a Fire-Emblem spin (character relationship elements, individual personalities) will make a solid amount of money.

slg 8y ago

The shock waves of this deal basically killed all competition in sport video games. When I was a kid there were usually 3 or 4 games in each of the big pro sports. Today there is really only one viable franchise per sport (even though I believe all the exclusive licenses have since expired). The market for these games is bigger than ever with EA bringing in almost $1 billion per year from their Madden and FIFA franchises. However the cost of licensing and the threat of another exclusivity bidding war means the barrier to entry and long term risk of creating a new franchise is sadly too high to get any serious competition.

emodendroket 8y ago
Isn't Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer still kicking around? You're essentially right otherwise though.
- modeless 8y ago
  Not for long: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/16/pes-2019-champions-league-fifa-heartbreak/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/16/pes-2019-champions-leagu...
  - mnm1 8y ago
    PES / WE has never had official licenses except for a few clubs here and there that change every season and no one cares because it's simply superior to FIFA in every other way. People have been playing this game for over two decades without official licenses. Losing the CL license will not affect the game much. EDIT: Also, there are community patches with all the kits, at least for PS4 / PC.
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  Dying a slow death. Sports is all about the stories, the personalities, the names, the drama, the tribalism. If you can't license the big teams or big competitions and have to rename everything (which PES is famous for) you just can't compete with the same feeling. And game quality wise they don't stand out anymore like they did for a few years to compensate. I used to play sports games 90% singleplayer or with friends in the same room. The fact you had PES and your friend had FIFA didn't matter much, even if one game sells 20% and the other 80% of marketshare, they can co-exist because when you play together, it's on one machine, the controls are just slightly different but they have quicksettings for those. Now that it's all gone online, network effects take over. If you want to multiplayer you both need the same game, and the dominant market share game will thrive while the rest basically offers singleplayer only + multiplayer mostly against a small community of mostly strangers. That's also partly why PES hasn't been doing very well the past few games I think.

rc_mob 8y ago

Yeah this ended any competition in NFL video games. Madden got a monopoly basically.

nkozyra 8y ago

Madden is fascinating to me because despite widespread user dissatisfaction with the game year-in, year-out, its users treat it like a necessity. I guess that's a monopoly in action. There is space for a competitive product, but it would need to be completely unlicensed. Without licensing, you'd need a simple way to customize rules, teams, players, etc. EAs NCAA series got around player issues in a similar way. If that customization were fostered, you could have a football game that with a few clicks was a better Madden and/or NCAA series. You'd just need to trade your licensing budget for a legal one.

slg 8y ago
You might notice that the NCAA series doesn't exist anymore and that is partly because that plausible deniability of using the community to circumvent licensing rules can only go so far.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  I think that's (a small) part of it. The surface reason is that EA did the same thing for a long time, creating players that looked like their real life counterparts with their real life attributes and real life numbers, etc. That's what bit them. You're really going to be hamstrung fighting an open-world, modifiable game unless you're showing obvious negligence in policing it.
  - slg 8y ago
    There would be numerous problems with 100% made up teams and players that would make it too risky for any big developer to attempt. 1. It would be hard to market without a single recognizable face or team. 2. It would be hostile to casual/novice users who couldn't play the game at its full potential out of the box. 3. It would be hard to create the online and esport modes that other sports games thrive on as you couldn't allow those custom rosters in competitive modes.
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      1. Absolutely. It would require some sort of viral approach. You won't win with traditional advertising. 2. Maybe. To be fair, I think the approach from point #1 would always come with an implicit :wink wink, nudge nudge:. 3. I'm not sure you couldn't allow it so much as you would be expected to respond to DMCA/etc in reasonable fashion.

Yhippa 8y ago

NFL 2K was the last big step change in football video games. You could put me on a desert island and I wouldn't miss Madden '18 one bit. Actually I bought Madden '18 which is the first time I've bought a football game in a long time. Madden Ultimate Team is pushed so hard in that game. It's terrible. And people who dump a ton of money into it...you can't even take it into the next season with you. One genre I'll really miss which will never come back are the NCAA Football and Basketball games. Understandably so.

segmondy 8y ago

This can be broken, make a customizable game. Players can name their teams, name the players, name the city, load custom jerseys, load different faces/skin. Let the underground and players build their own player. Make the game player much better.

bena 8y ago
This could work provided there was a dedicated enough userbase in the early adopters who had the drive and dedication to create the current league. Then when/if the game gets popular enough, there should be enough people to make keeping up trivial.
- segmondy 8y ago
  You can fake the userbase. ;-)
  - bena 8y ago
    I mean, you could do all the work yourself
ajmurmann 8y ago
This is exactly what's happening with Pro Evolution Soccer.
emodendroket 8y ago
They tried. It doesn't work. People want the license.

b3b0p 8y ago

This reminds me, I actually still play Tecmo Super Bowl and actually prefer it over Madden. There is a large fan community and they put out a ROM patch with updated rosters every year [0]. The same for NHL Hockey '94 [1]. [0] http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/550-tecmo-super-bowl-2018-presented-by-tecmobowlorg/ http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/550-tecmo-super-bowl-2018-pr... [1] http://www.nhl94.com http://www.nhl94.com

danso 8y ago

The source podcast ("Madden's Game, by 30 for 30) is itself very interesting for covering the development of the Madden games. Gets into great technical detail, such as how Madden refused to put his name on the game until developers could figure out how to make the game (in the 80s) have 11 vs. 11 players, as opposed to 7 vs. 7. Development stretched past 4 years and Madden's first game was predicted to be a financial failure. https://30for30podcasts.com/episodes/maddens-game/ https://30for30podcasts.com/episodes/maddens-game/

hatchoo 8y ago

I am not American but I gained an appreciation for American Football when I started playing NFL 2k when it came out for the Dreamcast. I continued buying the game when it was out for the PS2 and was sad when that exclusive license thing was announced. I was looking forward to the day when the license expired but sadly that day never came. One thing I also miss is the 2k College Hoops game. It was like playing NBA 2kx except that the rosters didn't matter because they were all randomly generated.

bobbles 8y ago

Pretty telling excerpt of the business BS going on from Wikipedia: ESPN NFL 2K5 was the first in the 2K series priced at $19.99 the day it shipped, much lower than market leader Madden NFL at $49.99. This greatly reduced Madden sales that year; one EA Sports developer recalled that "[i]t scared the hell out of us".[1] EA reduced Madden NFL 2005's price to $29.95. In December 2004 EA Sports acquired an exclusive rights agreement with the NFL and NFLPA to be the sole creator of NFL video games.[2] The deal terminated 2K Sports production of any further NFL games. The ensuing season, Madden 2006, saw pricing returned to the $49.99 MSRP. In December 2010, a U.S. district court judge certified a class action anti-trust lawsuit against Electronic Arts for anti-competitive practices to proceed.[3] Electronic Arts settled the class action suit in July 2012 for $27 million, and retained its exclusive NFL license.[4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_NFL_2K5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_NFL_2K5

anoncoward111 8y ago
I remember when this happened when I was just a kid of maybe 10 or 11. Around the time this was happening, you still had NFL blitz, street, fever, QB club, etc all duking it out for king of the sports games, especially. It was a time before social media, so we only really heard rumors about what happened. We all began to hate EA, even back then. We knew it was about money. 2k6 wasnt perfect and it was clunky at times, but it was way more cost effective to play, considering how much you had to pay for a new roster every year

jdhn 8y ago

Reading this thread is such a trip down nostalgia lane. NFL 2K (or maybe 2K1) was my first football game ever, and I have such good memories of playing it with my friends. Pity it had to die an early death, just like the Dreamcast.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Last season should have been a good one for me-- I'm a Vikings fan. But since the NFL became embroiled in politics, I quit watching-- and found I was fine without it. I look forward to more free time again this year. I see where soccer (football to a lot of the world) is picking up a little more interest in the US. Maybe that'll be a better way to get my sporting fix.

spiritcat 8y ago

:shakes fist vigorously: