EA Sports is a producer and publisher of sport video games and operates within the Electronic Arts brand. They got their start in 1991 and since then are the leading publisher of sports and sport related video games. They have a variety of popular titles such as FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL, and NBA Live. The interesting thing with sport video games is a new game is created each year to stay up-to-date with rosters for various sport teams. This means that people are always purchasing the games almost every year. This unique “strategy” ensures that EA Sports sees billions of dollars in revenue each year. We are going to dive deeper into EA Sports and take a look at 5 things you probably didn’t know about them.
5. They have sold over 100 million FIFA games
The FIFA line is EA Sports soccer video game, and it is the most popular game series of all the games that EA Sports makes. They released the first FIFA game in the early 1990’s and have been producing games under the FIFA title since. Lionel Messi currently stands as the cover player for the games.
4. They have no special ties to a specific console
There are a variety of video games that are only made for a specific console for example, the Halo series is only available on the Xbox consoles. This is not the case with EA Sports, as all newly released titles are optimized for all of the popular consoles currently on the market.
3. They used to make Rugby and Cricket video games
There was a brief period of time where EA Sports produced rugby and cricket games. EA Sports made cricket games from 1996-2007, and made rugby games from 1995-2008. These games were they few sport games that were not commonly played inside the United States, excluding the FIFA series.
2. They are one of the largest video game purchasers of copyrights and exclusivity deals
EA Sports bids and purchases the rights to make their video game titles based of the real thing. They compete with other game publishers like 2K for the rights to make certain sports video games. Being apart of one of the largest video game producers in the industry: Electronic Arts, EA Sports has a lot of purchasing power. For example, in 2005 they purchased a 15 year exclusivity deal with ESPN to integrate ESPN with EA Sports and their video games.
1. They sponsor an Irish Football Club
EA Sports sponsors the Irish soccer team Swindon Town F.C. under its FIFA video games line. They first sponsored the team in 2009 and even sponsor the League of Ireland Cup which is essentially the deciding game between the best two teams in all of Ireland.
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