ESPN: Will there ever be another NCAA football video game?

An excerpt:

But after interviews with more than 10 inside sources -- including those in the video game industry and executives at schools -- as of now there is no traction on EA making a new college game.

There are several reasons for this.

In order to make a game worth buying, EA is going to have to use the players' likenesses again. What the structure for payment would be is unclear because the settlement is one for past use, not a guide for the future.

Also, the settlement which produced roughly $1,000 per player was for that class (football and basketball players in that time frame). It's certainly up for debate whether any royalty generated and distributed -- as of the last agreement, around $10 million total went to schools -- would have to be distributed to all student athletes, which significantly lowers the individual payout each athlete would get.

Several athletic department sources suggested that the lack of an NCAA football game in particular has been detrimental to the sport, as young players have had to gravitate to other games. One AD wondered aloud whether schools would be willing to forgo their royalties and put the money into getting a game back on the shelves. He wondered how many kids have started watching European soccer games instead of college football on Saturdays as a result of playing EA's FIFA game.

That idea, at least initially, has been shot down because there is still concern about the prospect of being sued. The schools and EA would have to be indemnified against any lawsuit in order to move forward with that plan.

Courtesy: ESPN

Sadly, the game is dead and gone and never coming back. Better keep a working 360 or PS3 around if you want to keep playing NCAA ever again in the future.

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The most depressing thing I've read all day. I wish they'd at least try the real school, generic player route, no online sharing route.

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Originally Posted by souljahbill

The most depressing thing I've read all day. I wish they'd at least try the real school, generic player route, no online sharing route.

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Generic players yes. And they could easily be rated according to a star rating based on the position group.

They don't realize that most people just want the game back period. If dynasty is their bread and butter, then accurate rosters shouldn't matter. Give us our college football game back.

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Originally Posted by baseballplyrmvp

Generic players yes. And they could easily be rated according to a star rating based on the position group.

They don't realize that most people just want the game back period. If dynasty is their bread and butter, then accurate rosters shouldn't matter. Give us our college football game back.

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I don't know about "most". I'm sure EA has metrics on this, but the number of people who would just end up playing Online Ranked or H2H or Ultimate Team, all of which would suffer with generic players, versus Dynasty would be a very interesting breakdown to look at. I agree that most of the online community plays Dynasty, so the rosters don't really matter beyond Year 2, but I don't know if the community is really indicative of the entire customer base.

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Originally Posted by JeffHCross

I don't know about "most". I'm sure EA has metrics on this, but the number of people who would just end up playing Online Ranked or H2H or Ultimate Team, all of which would suffer with generic players, versus Dynasty would be a very interesting breakdown to look at. I agree that most of the online community plays Dynasty, so the rosters don't really matter beyond Year 2, but I don't know if the community is really indicative of the entire customer base.

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Rereading a lot in this threads and others, and I think a lot of us are getting hung up on what a generic player really is.

From what I gathered, EA got in trouble for rating players and giving them their exact real life counterpart characteristics. Jersey numbers, skin color, height, weight, hometown, etc. Practically all of the asthetics were as accurate as possible, which was where they got in trouble, as it left little doubt the video game players were based off real life people.

Fixing the issue, we have several options. The first one, is the most tedious for them but it allows the continual use of online H2H play with rated players. All EA would have to do is randomize the asthetics of each player. This could easily be done by making the best QB on every team QB #1. Second string is QB #2, and etc for every position.

EA could still go about rating players they way they did in the past, there would just have to be a little roundabout in connecting a team's best player to his video game jersey. This only has to beat the eye ball test right out of the box. To a non biased judge, it would be impossible for him to say the video game is based on real players, if every team's best QB is numbered 1, best rb is 21, ol 51, etc for all the other players.

Option 2 is to randomize every player, and redo the whole rating system, instead of focusing on individual players, they rate position groups. This allows for parody within each group, something they could tune through a tuner update, but would still allow rosters to be close to what they are now as they would focus on the strengths of the position group instead of each player. This would also allow people to build identities with their teams in dynasty, as player development could be tuned to the identity of each position group.

Either of these options allow people to play with teams in the same manner they currently do in H2H games. All that needs to be done is to change the players number, and to change his asthetics details in the player info screen. Ratings and position can be kept the same. If EA does that, this game can come back.