Last year, we learned the very disappointing news that EA Sports would be ending their annual NCAA Football series of video games, which came only a couple months after losing the NCAA license for the game. The main reason for this decision was the ongoing litigation about the illegal use of players’ likenesses in the game, even without the names being outright used in the game. Now, it has come out that EA Sports actually tried to get the rights a few years ago to officially use the players names and likenesses in the game, but obviously failed.
AL.com has reported that EA Sports tried to get the rights to use players names and likenesses in the same way that networks like ESPN do so on a daily basis. To get the NCAA to agree to this, EA Sports offered to reintroduce elements to the series that the NCAA often requested, such as “academic related features, APR, NCAA values etc.” However, this obviously did not ever pan out, but maybe we will eventually get something worked out and be able to get another college football video game in the future. I sure know I will be greatly missing the series when it would normally release this coming July, as I’m still playing last year’s release pretty often.
