The Fall of Madden

(Madden hasn't gone anywhere-- it's just not very good anymore)

VIDEO GAMESHISTORY

Joel

1/18/20234 min read

Ranking amongst the longest-running game franchises in history, Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL games have been hitting the field since the days of the Commodore 64 and continue to score amongst the best-selling titles season after season. Despite this storied history and consistently high sales, football fans have had their issues with Madden for a while. These issues have led to trending Twitter hashtags, calling for the NFL to cut ties with Madden, as well as Metacritic scores as low as 0.2/10. So what has fans so upset? How could EA be fumbling the Madden franchise so much?

The answer comes down to two things, the first: exclusive licensing. Back in 2004, 2K Games released the sixth installment of their own, officially licensed NFL franchise: ESPN NFL 2K5. Both critically and amongst fans, 2K5 was an instant superstar. It had better animations, gameplay, presentation, and AI than EA’s own Madden 2005. Even today, 2K5 is revered by many as the greatest football game ever made. 2K scored right down the middle, and the real kicker: 2K5 only cost $19.99, while Madden 2005 cost $49.99.

Madden had no defense in the face of 2K’s all-star title. 2K5 beat them in every aspect, and Madden’s sales suffered enough to scare the company. But what EA did have was money. Lots of it. Madden has always been a huge money-maker, something EA wanted to hold onto at all costs. So what they did was cut a deal with the NFL, securing the exclusive right to license Madden as an NFL game. 2K has never made an official NFL game since (though they did make an unlicensed one in 2007, All-Pro Football 2K8, which is so good that it still has a dedicated community to this day).

With no competition, Madden has had no real reason to improve. So it hasn’t. Year after year, a new Madden game comes out that makes marginal tweaks to gameplay, has slightly better graphics than the year before, features some new gimmicky twist on a career/franchise mode, and has an updated roster. All of the ways 2K5 was better than Madden 2005 basically still ring true with modern Madden titles. With no competition, why bother updating throwing animations or implementing proper, physics-based tackling? Football fans have no other official NFL games to play, so Madden continues to sell well every single year.

The other part of this problem comes from the focus of EA executives: making money. Both Madden and the FIFA soccer games feature a competitive, team-building mode called Ultimate Team, where players gamble on packs of virtual trading cards and can spend a lot of real-life dollars buying specific players’ cards in order to add those players to their team. Predatory microtransactions aside, it’s a pretty neat idea. One that scores EA a lot of easy money. In 2020 alone, these Ultimate Team modes netted EA $1.62 billion, amounting for 29% of the gaming giant’s total revenue. It doesn’t take a cheesehead to tell you that that’s a lotta cheddar.

Naturally, there’s a monumental profit-incentive behind maintaining Ultimate Team. Squashing bugs and fine-tuning running mechanics are two things that don’t translate to $1.62 billion a year in profits. Follow the money, and it becomes evident that Madden’s rampant bugginess and lack of polish can both be attributed to where EA places its resources: in milking Ultimate Team. After all, why fight for short gains when you can go for the endzone every play?

Modern Madden is in a sad state. And with the renewal of their exclusive licensing deal with the NFL in 2020, extending their monopoly through 2026, there’s little reason to expect things will improve. What should be a franchise uplifted by over 30 years of experience and all of the talent and resources that a company as big as Electronic Arts should possess, has instead become a bug-infested series with stagnant gameplay that exists not for the love of the game but for the love of money.