A year after ending a two-decade-long relationship with EA Sports, FIFA’s counterattack in video games is… Rocket League?
Football’s global sanctioning body has announced that it is teaming up with Epic Games and Psyonix on a popular automobile adaptation of The Beautiful Game as part of FIFA’s eSports initiative. Sixteen nations will be represented in the game, and the associated eSports competition will compete for cash and prizes at some point.
This is still very much speculation. Right now, FIFA is simply asking fans which countries should be included in this stage of FIFA’s eSports World Cup. On the other hand, FIFA wants to stock a realistic competition field based on the number of representatives each country had in previous Rocket League Majors. No event dates, much less teams or their seedings have been set yet.
“This milestone partnership highlights our commitment to growing our football esports ecosystem,” FIFA said. in a statement “And we will continue to build the biggest platform for all communities to bring their sports to prominence.”
Awesome, but not only is it not a real soccer competition, it’s a video game in which small, radio-controlled cars are playing soccer. It’s very different from the tournaments that FIFA ran in partnership with Electronic Arts last year before they both split up.
FIFA President of the past year Gianni Infantino said The football body remained committed to the video games sector and in February, Rumors began to spread 2K Sports, creators of the NBA 2K series, were next in line to create a FIFA licensed video game.
What that will look like is anyone’s guess. The reason EA Sports can do its own thing by breaking away from FIFA is that the FIFA license was really just that – a license to use the FIFA name and marks. Yes, that includes rights to the World Cup and Women’s World Cup, but those are once-in-four-years tournaments, most recently held in 2022 and 2023.
The parts of the series that have really caught people’s attention, from the English Premier League to national teams for Euro 2024 and even the Ballon d’Or, are licenses that FIFA does not control.
In addition, given the conflict with Konami’s challenger eFootball/Pro Evolution Soccer, EA Sports FC has tremendous licensing leverage After working on that series for over a decade, it turns out that anything resembling a full-featured, licensed football video game depends on a lot more than just the FIFA name-plate.
How is EA Sports’ football game doing without FIFA?
Electronic Arts revealed in January that “net bookings” — as in, the revenue the company gets from open-ended cash-cow modes like Ultimate Team — increased slightly, as did actual unit sales of EA Sports FC 24 were lower than last yearNaturally, they’re comparing those figures to sales of a FIFA-branded title in a World Cup year, so they were likely to be lower anyway. And either way, the franchise is still making a lot of money.
In any case, you’re still talking about a sport that’s not about cars but about humans playing soccer.
Whether teaming up with Rocket League is truly an “unprecedented partnership,” as FIFA calls it, or whether it’s just a temporary measure to bring EA Sports and FIFA together again until World Cup 2026, remains to be seen.
fifa-touts-esports-partnership-with-rocket-league-which-isnt-exactly-esports-soccer
