It has been nearly 8 years since the last college video game By EA or any other videogame company had been released due to High profile legal trouble led by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’bannon on using players, name image, and likeness without paying the player witch was not allowed due to paying college players any type of compensation or special treatment is a major violation in the NCAA rulebook and could kick players off their teams or get them kicked out of their school completely. After back and forth lawsuits EA and other companies were forced to stop production of all college video games and lost to Ed O’bannon.
On Feb 2nd EA tweeted this
After a long wait, college fans have their fan-favorite NCAA football games coming back on next-generation Playstation 5 and Xbox series X and had a community that was begging for years to get what they finally wanted was beyond excited with the surprise announcement. With many players and celebrities tweeting about it.
Many things led to the return of the NCAA games, for example, Instagram accounts like @bring.back.ncaa were the driving force as it was a community account and showed off the number of people who still played the 8-year-old game on their Xbox 360’s and PS3’s. Along with the game still being very popular on youtube with many channels playing the game to this day. And even a group of modders releasing an NCAA 14 mod that updated the rosters and graphics making little improvements to the game.
But how will they be able to make games now without getting in legal trouble? Well EA has said that having fake players might being an option but their goal for the new game is to have real players along with putting money in their pockets and this just might be able to work due to states wanting the NCAA to allow players to make money on their Name image and likeness so that they would be able to do things like advertisements and make money off social media. If these were passed it would allow EA for the first time to use real players and their real names and have both sides happy with players being played and the player having the best possible game.
