EA says Ditching FIFA Will Make Games Better In New Report

EA CEO Andrew Wilson says that the FIFA license just isn’t good for them if they want to improve their immensely popular football series, VGC reports.

According to the report, Wilson described that FIFA has been an “Impediment” to adding more features to the game, claiming they wanted to double its license fees to 2.5 billion USD “over the next decade”.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

He continued: “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 license only covers certain categories.

Wilson also expressed some frustration with FIFA over the whole debacle, describing the license as little more than “four letters on the box” if it’s a non-World Cup Year, yet with serious hindrances on the actual gameplay.

“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”, he says.

This souring of the relationship between EA and FIFA has been going on since the release of FIFA 22 last year, as EA entertained the possibility of them moving away from the popular football license.

What’s interesting to note is the details of their license agreements that Wilson mentioned- the FIFA games have earned a bad reputation over the years for minimal gameplay changes with every edition.

With this report it would seem like the fault lies more in FIFA than EA, since Wilson describes the nature of the license also controlling the types of gameplay they could include.

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