The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty | Hacker News Reader

The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty

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41 pointsTomte28 comments

They bought the exclusive contract to the NFL when they faced a challenge from 2K games. That's how this dynasty stays around.

I don't think that's adequate, that explanation is buck-passing. The NFL doesn't care about Madden or EA, it just cares about making money; if someone else offered it more money, they'd sell the license to them. So why has EA been able to keep paying the NFL's bill and keep the fanbase to pay it off? It looks like they've been able to build a brand, and have invested a ton in constant finetuning and additional football-nerd details that a competitor would have serious difficulty in living up to in the first iteration of any AAA competing football game, combined with an annual iteration which means that with the usual 3 year development cycle, any competitor would be obsolete quickly.

For one EA is ~3 times the size of Take Two interactive (parent of parent of 2k sports). Logic would dictate they just out bid on the rights to Madden each and every year.

I've bought Madden every year up to 2015 and personally call bull shit on the idea that EA has continually added value to the franchise. They've added Ultimate team, a feature that lets users purchase players and bet on online games (it uses virtual currency so it's not gambling right!), as well as a handful of small feature improvements year over year... that's it. The biggest sell year on end is roster updating and graphics tweaks.

TLDR; used to buy Madden every year, now I categorically don't.

> For one EA is ~3 times the size of Take Two interactive (parent of parent of 2k sports). Logic would dictate they just out bid on the rights to Madden each and every year.

That is still not an explanation. If Take Two Interactive can make more money off a NFL-licensed game than EA can, then the NFL will go with them; and if EA pays more for the NFL license than EA can make, then they are losing money each year, and potentially an enormous and crippling amount. There is no evidence they are bleeding constantly like you seem to postulate.

They've added value year over year, but the amount of value is lower than I think it would be with proper competition. EA's Soccer game Fifa has competition from Pro Evolution Soccer and the consumer is better off because of it.

Given that the contract was for 5 years initially, then extended another five and now it looks like another three at least I'd argue that it's plenty of explanation for why Madden is dominant. In the time that contract takes to expire it makes it completely unfeasible for any company to take on EA because no one will have Football game tech like Madden.

And each of those expiries was yet another chance for another video game company to outbid EA. Yet, they did not.

Yeah, really not much of a story here: EA has an exclusive license for an incredibly popular American sport. Sports and video games are right in the young-male, demographic wheelhouse

If I wasn't mistaken the deal was for like 10+ years which in video games is more than enough time to kill any hope of competition.

There was an edition back in the day that didn't have the NFL rights:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madden_Football_64

I wonder what the story was there.

and Front Page Sports Football had already tanked with a version that never got patched to actually work. It had a nice package though. I still think FPS: Football was a better game.

There's this odd little rumor/story that gets passed around from time to time that Madden, deep down in the core of its object code, is still running the SNES game engine from the 1990s.

From a blog somewhere else:

"Madden 2015 has a long, dark history. Inside its inmost code, there's a tiny copy of snes9x, linked to a tiny virtual display, used only in memory, never shown to the user. This arrangement has been used to drive every version of Madden since John Madden Football 97, although the emulator then was a custom job written (poorly) by EA."

I worked on Madden for several years. It would be delightful and hilarious if that were true.

There is some very old code in there, or at least was when I was on it. I recall digging up the code that updated your score on a touchdown—not a bit of logic that has much need to change—and saw Steve Chiang's initials on it, from back when he still coded.

One obvious sign is that it's a fake is that there's no way there would be a shitty emulator in Madden. Icer Addis, the creator of Nesticle, worked on Madden for years and wouldn't have tolerated that. If there was an emulator, it would be a good one.

Answer me this: why does the opponent wait until 2 minutes left in the game to do an onsides kick and then they will do it even if I'm ahead by 6 touchdowns?

Some further digging actually sent me back here (via a "Breaking Madden" article linked from a Metafilter discussion)[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513

If only there was a tiny copy of an NES emulator running Tecmo Super Bowl in there instead.

Can pretty well confirm this isn't true; 97 for PSX etc was a fresh rewrite in C++.

I tracked that quote down to a MetaFilter post, and it seemed to be intended as a joke about a modern Madden game using antiquated coding techniques: http://www.metafilter.com/142452/Breaking-Madden-2-Break-Har...

FTA: "In 2004, EA paid the NFL a reported $300 million-plus for five years of exclusive rights to teams and players. The deal was later extended to 2013. Just like that, competing games went kaput."

They became a monopoly.

The 2K football games were superior at the time. Then they dropped their price significantly ($20 for 2k5 after 2k4 was a success) and EA decided they couldn't compete. So that deal was signed so that they wouldn't have to. And thus I stopped buying NFL games.

Interesting that ESPN doesn't seem to mention this in the article considering their name and properties were used for the 2K games.

So they need to turn a profit of $60 million/year just to pay for the rights? Granted, it worked out well for them in the end, but that was quite a gamble.

I'd really like to see a Gruden NFL game myself

...with an automatic win for the team that runs "Spider 2 Y Banana" first.

Well maybe you could be the one to figure out how this thing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0azTHBn-E

I remember asking my dad how I was supposed to play this when I was about 4... he didn't know either.

While we're on the subject of old football games, no discussion is complete without mentioning the amazing PlayMaker Football released by Broderbund in 1989 and featured on this episode of Computer Chronicles: https://youtu.be/1vMfW32TNo0?t=17m16s

Looks pretty simple to me, you're playing "offensive and defensive coordinator" during the game, instead of the usual "player(s)"

Interesting, I had Madden on the Genesis and enjoyed it a lot. Shortly after that I got into stocks, too bad I didn't put two and two together.

Now that I think of it, I just played the game at home and had no idea how popular and financially successful it was.

its always been confusing to me how the NCAA franchise got so little love and was eventually killed off. It should have been essentially the same engine but always lagged multiple years behind in functionality.

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