NCAA football is coming back.... kinda
NCAA football, and college sports games in general disappeared in 2014 after a massive lawsuit demanding payment for their likeness being used in a game without compensation went to court and ended up costing EA $60 million. Obviously, no game manufacturer is going to take a chance at this sort of court settlement being built into the cost of production, so all titles featuring college-level players were discontinued from that point forward.
I always preferred college football and basketball games over the ones featuring professional players, even though I can't say exactly why that is. Probably because there are so many more teams and I have some sort of allegiance to certain cities by virtue of having lived there.
Well, college players are not allowed to be compensated for their skills while in college and this extends to everything. They can actually be kicked off the team and miss out on a lucrative professional career if they do so much as even make paid appearances for local car washes. They can't receive anything other than the free college tuition.
We all know that certain "booster clubs" work around this in order to do favors for the players' families and what not, but the repercussions for this can be swift and long-standing, so mostly people don't mess with it.
IMackulate Vision Gaming is hoping to release "Gridiron Champions" in 2020 but none of the teams will have the "correct" player names or likenesses. The teams will also not have the correct names or mascots. However, there is one thing that the home audience can do to change this.
Taking a page out of Pro Evolution Soccer playbook, player / users can customize the team and players appearance any way that they please and then upload it for others to use. I can tell you exactly what is going to happen here. Someone is going to painstakingly recreate each and every college team in order for it to match up properly.
If the game is good, this could actually work wonderfully and dodge all lawsuits because the manufacturer doesn't actually have a hand in this at all.
There are many ways that this could go badly: For one thing IMV, the developer, is only working on today's systems and if the new systems drop, they would need to go back to the drawing board. Also, they are operating off of something like $10 million from kickstarters and what not, which sounds like a lot but is it really? There are also negotiations to pay players for their likeness in sports games but everyone would be paid equally. If this were to happen and the figure was able to be made low enough, EA would almost certainly get involved.
Regardless of which of these end up happening, the good news is that people are talking about getting a college game on the market again, which really works for me either way.
What do you think? Do you prefer the college experience in sports games? Would you buy this if it was released?
The problem I had about that lawsuit is there are 130 teams in the NCAA and of all those teams there are bound to be players who feel they should have money cause they are in the game. Just be glad there is a game at all! Can you imagine how long it takes to get all 130 teams setup in the game with all the members of the team. The roster changes every year cause Seniors graduate and there are new freshmen. Heck i am not sure if the stats per team are base on RL stats. Basically what i am saying is the players who thought they deserve the money don't deserve to be in the NFL. If you are in the NFL then yeh give people like Cam Newton or Tom Brady their fare share but not going to worry about a Sophmore from San Jose University name Joe Bob Thorton. They should worry more about their education then anything else.
As for the game itself i miss playing it! I love college level games more the pro level when it comes to Basketball and Football. I'd play some games from the past week to see if i change the outcome even though it never counted in RL.
I agree, i don't know how they could possibly get all the rosters and decide about how much to pay each person. I mean when I was in college I knew guys that never played, they were just there "in case" .... do these guys get paid the same?
It's all very complicated
But if you ever played Pro Evo Soccer you would notice that the players had names that were similar to the stars but far enough away that they couldn't sue and they didn't look like them. The game allowed for a lot of customization though and people who owned the game would spend a lot of time changing the names and adjusting the look and then upload the "real" team. Other players would then download these teams and this relieved Konami of any legal responsibility because they didn't do it.
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