A pretty hefty class action lawsuit has been filed against EA Sports.
The suit accuses EA Sports of “unlawful and anticompetitive… exclusive agreements with the National Football League, the NFL Players Union, Arena Football League and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.”
Now, anyone who has taken a high school-level U.S. history course should already know that we have a series of antitrust laws that are meant to prevent the creation of monopolies and to preserve competition between businesses. According to this lawsuit, “Electronic Arts has driven its competition out of the market for interactive football software, including most significantly Take Two Interactive Software, Inc., the maker of the interactive football software title NFL 2K5 and has prevented additional competitors from entering the market.”
In layman’s terms, there is only one type of “football” game that gamers appear to be interested in buying, and that’s an NFL (or other officially licensed) football game. However, if EA holds an exclusivity agreement with the NFL, and thus are the only company that can use the NFL, its likenesses, and its players, then they, effectively, become the only professional football game worth buying on the market.
The suit is looking to prevent EA from forming any further exclusivity agreements, thus allowing other companies to use the likenesses of the NFL and NCAA in their games. This would effectively stop EA Sports from being the only name in football out there.
Then again, there is room to dispute this. No one has really tried to make a football game not involving the NFL. We haven’t exactly seen the return of Tecmo Bowl. The question is, could a game like this survive against EA Sports and its NFL license?