Here’s another article that gives me the willies. Electronic Arts had (unbeknownst to me) already acquired exclusive rights from the NFL and Arena football leagues to produce games using league team names and player likenesses for video game consoles and computers. Now, they’ve also gained the same rights from the NCAA for football games — for six years. So, when you buy that shiny new XBox 2 or Playstation 3 or Nintendo whatever-they’re-going-to-call-it, if you want any kind of football game with real teams and players (which I suspect outsell titles with names like Nintendo Playaction Football, considering those games have been produced infrequently in recent years), EA will be the only game in town. No more ESPN NFL 2K5. No more NFL Blitz. No more NFL Gameday. No more NFL Quarterback Club. There will only be John Madden football.
“But I don’t play video games. Why does this matter to me?” you ask…
The video game industry is a bigger business than movies now, doing $9.9 billion in 2004. Microsoft sold $125 million in Halo 2 copies the first day it was out. Spiderman 2 — which, to date, had the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time — only did $114 million its first weekend.
So, it matters to you because it’s not going to be long before powerhouse publishers like Electronic Arts dip their hands into other forms of entertainment, and push smaller publishers out with their massive bankroll, which will be drastically fattened by what will become their near-monopoly on the football video game market.
You’ve already seen it happen with Sony, who is ahead of the curve in the (hold your noses) synergy game. They produce the films. They publish the films in theaters and on DVDs. They sell the DVD players you watch the films on. They publish the video games based on the films.
If you pay attention to the video game and movie industries, you can see the paradigm of compartmentalized media is dying rapidly. Even though initial efforts to combine the different areas have been clunky (Interactive TV, Microsoft Media PCs, Nokia NGage, and a bevy of others), companies will eventually figure out how to seamlessly merge interactive content with films, photos, movies and other existing mediums. Think CGI characters in films. Once that happens with more consistency, many of the existing players will start to drop like flies, whether by acquisition or by sheer inability to compete with rolling snowballs like Sony.
This model of consolidation also applies to the news media. Daily newspaper circulation has been steadily declining for years now, and no reason exists to think that will change. Even the newspapers that are still treading water are generally under the thumb of mega companies like Knight Ridder and Cox. When the electronics and media companies successfully merge the different forms of media, whatever remains of independent radio and television will be swallowed up by whatever emerges from the rubble.
As this cycle progresses, fewer and fewer companies will own access to greater and greater-sized markets. Diversity of opinion will die, along with the ideas of individual freedom and democracy. So, thank you EA Sports for taking us one step closer to the end of civilization.
Think that’s scary? Check out this. It’s unbelievable how much information advertisers are going to have about our viewing habits in the next few years.
[...] In an April post, I wrote about how Electronic Arts secured exclusive licenses to use NFL teams and rosters and NCAA teams, giving them a monopoly on the league-licensed football game market. It appears one of their first acts as a monopolist has been to scrap the Gamecube version of NCAA Football 2006, depriving players who own that console the opportunity to play any NCAA-licensed football game. There was no explanation in the NCAA 2006 press release, and EA’s publicist refused to email me back. You’ll notice the game isn’t on EA’s release schedule. I’ll stress again why this means something to you, the non-gamer, by quoting from my last post on the subject. The video game industry is a bigger business than movies now, doing $9.9 billion in 2004. Microsoft sold $125 million in Halo 2 copies the first day it was out. Spiderman 2 — which, to date, had the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time — only did $114 million its first weekend. [...]