“A barrier“: that’s how the boss of Electronic Arts, former boss of EA Sports, would have qualified the mark FIFA, affixed on the simulation of football of the editor for 30 years, during an internal meeting.
In a long intervention delivered in detail and anonymously to VGC, Andrew Wilson would have made a speech intended to show that the presence of FIFA on the jacket was no longer as relevant as before for the publisher.
“I’m going to be more transparent… More transparent than I’ve been publicly. We’ve had a great relationship with FIFA for about 30 years now. We created billions of dollars of value. It is enormous. We have created one of the biggest entertainment licenses in the worldhe would have started.
“I would tell you – and it may sound a bit biased – that the FIFA brand now carries more weight as a video game than as the governing body of football. We don’t take this situation for granted and we try not to be arrogant about it. We are working really hard to make FIFA understand what we need going forward.
To put it simply, what FIFA gives us in the years without the World Cup are four letters on the front of the box, in a world where most people don’t even see it anymore, due to paperless purchases. In a World Cup year of course, we can have access to competition, and that’s important. But in a larger context, based on annualized games, that’s not the big deal. We have 300 other licenses: they give us the content that most deeply engages our players. “
Remove the straitjacket of FIFA
More broadly, the words of Andrew Wilson outline the direction that EA would like to give to its series, and for which FIFA would actually represent a real constraint. A future made up of brands, alternative game modes, in line with Volta, and perhaps (unsurprisingly) metaverses.
“We thought about the future we want for the franchise, for its development, and ironically, the FIFA license turns out to be an obstacle to that“, Wilson would have explained. “Our players are asking us for more commercial and cultural brands that speak to them, that are relevant to their markets, to be more deeply integrated into the game…Brands like Nike. Today, because of the relationship that exists between FIFA and Adidas, we cannot do that.“.
“Our players are asking us for more game modes, different things from 11v11, different types of gameplay. I’ll tell you it’s been a struggle to get FIFA to accept the kind of things we want to create. They claim that our license indeed only covers certain categories. Our players want to see us expand more broadly into the digital ecosystem, they want to see us there, participating in that space.
“Our FIFA license prevented us from doing all that. Again, FIFA is just the name on the box, but they have hampered our ability to get into all of these areas where players are waiting for us.“, would have justified the boss of EA, specifying to finish that FIFA prevented the publisher from being as reactive as he would like to innovate and experiment.
Win-win for EA
The various information released by several American media in the course of the fall, as well as the declarations of the two parties, until then left very little room for ambiguity as to the final outcome of this discussion. And Andrew Wilson would only have confirmed the trend at the conclusion of this speech, despite a 2023 episode which should always bear the famous acronym.
The question of the price of the license, which FIFA would have revised upwards, would therefore only be the tip of the iceberg, and the divorce seems well and truly consummated: “In the end, I don’t know if we will be able to agree. And paradoxically, if we don’t succeed, but we manage to renew our brand by keeping control of this global football ecosystem that we are trying to build, we will probably generate more revenue, attract more players and engage them more sustainably“.
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