Microsoft reportedly had to cancel a sports game for the original Xbox, because EA demanded it.
When you think of sports games, the first developer you’ll likely think of is EA. While the company has plenty of other franchises under its belt like The Sims, Mass Effect and most recently Star Wars, it’s best-known for sporting series like FIFA or Madden NFL.
EA’s latest sports game is EA Sports FC 24, which you can check out below
EA’s supremacy over sports games has rarely been challenged, much to the dismay of fans who’ve been less than happy with some of the company’s newest releases, many of which are considered to be either the same game again, or an inferior version.
The company reportedly flexed its dominance in the early 2000s with the original Xbox, when it forced a first-party soccer game into cancellation.
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Former Xbox employee Garrett Young spoke about the game on the Kiwi Talkz podcast, and recalled how Xbox wanted to avoid the mistakes of SEGA by ensuring EA titles made it onto the new platform.
SEGA unfortunately left console warfare behind with the SEGA Dreamcast, which bombed despite having some great titles on it like Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Jet Set Radio.
Young said one of the theories from Microsoft on why SEGA lost the console race was due to it having no support from EA on the Dreamcast, a mistake the company wanted to avoid at all costs.
This led to a deal with EA to bring several sports games onto the new platform, but unfortunately clashed with a first-party soccer game Young was working on, which had to be scrapped entirely to uphold the agreement.
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In a way, it was likely for the best, as the support from EA was likely a driving factor in getting new Xbox consoles to consumers and eventually making it the Sony/PlayStation competitor it is today.
Maybe if SEGA had pushed more for EA games on the Dreamcast, it’d still be part of the modern-day console wars, unlikely given the quality of Nintendo’s games, but definitely something to think about.