Gianni Infantino, the controversial president of world soccer federation FIFA, has revealed that an announcement of a brand-new FIFA-licensed series of video games to rival EA Sports FC will be coming “very soon.”
Developer and publisher EA Sports and FIFA had a very fruitful partnership for over two decades, which produced one of the best selling video game series of all time. This long-lived cooperation ended very publicly last year due to irreconcilable differences about financial matters. Reportedly, FIFA asked for $1 billion in licensing fees from EA Sports to continue naming its games after the federation.
In addition to feeling hamstrung by FIFA in creative matters, that price was too much for EA to stomach. It will continue developing its popular game series, renaming it EA Sports FC.
FIFA had announced that it would look for other developers to take up the mantle and release an officially licensed soccer game – so far, though, the organization only released a NFT game for the 2022 World Cup, which went as well as you’d expect it to. Nothing has been revealed about the supposed EA Sports FC competitor as of yet.
During his recent re-election as FIFA’s president, Infantino stated: “The new FIFA game – the FIFA 25, 26, 27 and so on – will always be the best egame for any girl or boy, we will have news on this very soon.”
That quote already tells you a lot about Infantino’s attitude towards gaming: He used the utterly nonsensical term “egames” and called the game’s potential audience “girl or boy” – one can only assume because in his mind video games are only for kids and so players must be infantilized?
Infantino’s timetable is also very optimistic, as FIFA 25 would have to be released in 2024, if we are to stick to the naming scheme that’s been in place for the EA Sports series for years.
EA Sports can easily churn out a game annually, because they already have the framework in place from the predecessor and also have a huge amount of experience in this process, but anyone wanting to work on a soccer game from scratch is going to need a lot more time. If quality is of any importance, that is.
With FIFA’s proven history of greed and corruption it’s more likely that a quick profit is the biggest motivator, though.
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