Topic: Football/Soccer

@sillygostly:
I still say they release like maybe 2 entries of each sports game every generation, maximum, then upgrade each of those with DLC or a subscription for roster updates. There are more economical ways to do what 3rd parties do, period, and I know a lot of people have known that for a long time. Nintendo sold the Mario Kart 8 DLC for $11.99, and that's added alot of value, otherwise someone like EA or Activision would have just released a Mario Kart 9 already.

Licensing from the NFL, NHL, etc, also effects this. EA might have to pay an expensive license for NFL, NHL, etc. I was going to buy Ashes Cricket '13 for Wii U (which would support Wii remote motion controls), but it ended up getting cancelled. That means the Cricket association or whatever it is called wasn't paying for it, probably.

I've had a quick search session. I don't think it was Adidas Power Soccer. I think it more likely to be something along the lines of Football Champ - the description of it on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Champ) is the closest match to my memory found so far, and a quick look at gameplay on Youtube looks familiar too, though I couldn't find any punching going on. But it looks like it had a SNES, Amiga and PC release so maybe I can find it somewhere and try it out for myself...

That's a very good point that didn't come to mind. But one could also argue that the minimal costs of developing the games (considering that they're essentially the same year-in year-out), and relatively high sales, particularly for the FIFA franchise, would be more than sufficient to cover the costs of licensing. But as we've established before, this is EA we're talking about here; the very same company that saw fit to charge over $6 for a freakin' gum ball machine to use in The Sims 3 (which is more expensive than many complete games).

I am not in any way a cricket fan, however, I had my eye set on this game when it was announced, up until the moment it was unceremoniously cancelled. There is a cricket game released on PC and last-generation consoles called Don Bradman Cricket 2014, and it was released on PS4 and Bone earlier this year, but I don't know how widely available these games are considering that Don Bradman is Australia's most famous cricketer in history (he was prolific in the early 1900s), though I think that many people worldwide would not have heard of him. Sport games on Wii generally seemed to be quite good, so I would have been willing to give Ashes Cricket a go, but we know how that ended. I don't think it had much to do with the cricket association considering that the PC version was released at one point (though promptly taken down due to overwhelming complaints about the game's abysmal quality).

In light of this, the console versions were cancelled shortly thereafter.

Here's a question for all of you footy fans who play videogames. Would you rather have:

• a very good football game with NO LICENCES, meaning players, competitions et al with fake (but manually editable) names, but you can get yearly updates at a fraction of its original cost.

or

• a very good football game FULLY LICENCED and up to date with the real thing, but that it requires you to buy a new version every year for full price.

what would you rather have?!

They both have their place. There's no reason why one football game couldn't provide the option for both, however a generic football game would never generate the sales of a fully licensed game such as the FIFA or PES franchises, hence why there are so few of them.

The fact is that the majority of football fans (many of whom I'm sure actually watch football matches on a regular basis and have a favourite team or two) will want a game in which they can play as their favourite teams and battle against their rivals or against teams that have beaten their favourite teams in real life. Even though I don't follow real-world football matches, I bought Fifa 12 for 3DS on sale a few years ago hoping that the Turkish national team or at least SOME Turkish teams would be included in the game. Unfortunately, there weren't any, which made me regret the purchase, but at least it included a few Australian teams that I had heard about.

Regardless of consumer wants, annualised sport games continue to sell really well and they will continue to be released in this fashion so long as there are people who continue to buy them. This isn't an issue of preference. If this business model proves to be unsustainable then I have no doubt that publishers will instead opt for an alternative, such as a DLC/patching model or an annual/monthly subscription based model. Football fans want the ability to engage with their favourite teams and these games give them the opportunity to do so. Since most fans will never be professional football players themselves, licensed games give people a taste of a world that is otherwise closed off to them, which perhaps sums up the overall appeal of these games.

@sillyghostly
I understand EA charges ridiculous prices for DLC, a lot of the time, but the sport clubs that provide the licenses for a "realistic" experience are still part of it, obviously. That's why I'm saying that somewhere between EA and the sports clubs, is where the games are being overpriced. That's why FIFA '13 being the only FIFA game on the platform is a good idea, but also a bad one, because now there is only one game to buy that covers the franchise, but now the new game comes out next year, and it's not worth paying $60 for something that could be obviously cheaper.

The only reason why I was even considering buying Ashes Cricket '13, was because it's a sport I haven't played and isn't as widely known as baseball. Seeing an entry for a sports game like that, especially with the use of motion controls, sparked my interest, but alas. If the Cricket Association would have actually cared, we'd probably have that game, and we all know multiple sports games can exist; AKA: the EA sports and 2K. That's why a Cricket game with official licensing on Wii U would have mattered, period, because now they are basically telling the consumer that it didn't even matter that that sports game was on the platform, kind of like EA and 2K did on Wii U.

I'm pretty sure the Dan Bradman's Cricket doesn't have the motion controls, but I'll have to check(I think there's a peripheral that's available in AU, not sure). The EA games have Kinect support, but not PS Move, which brings me back to the point that some things are getting cut short, while still being at the consumers' expense. That's why sports games having both the GamePad and Wii remote + nunchuck as options, would have mattered. Even MLB the Show didn't have PS Move support, and that's Sony 1st party stuff. So ya, they've gone backwards in some ways, while failing to forward in others, which is why it's especially not worth buying these yearly sports games for $60, with minor updates where appropriate.