Pat, imagine if EA owned Gears of War & not via Epic Games, if it was their own product and they didn’t have to worry about how the studio underneath would react to their practises. You'd be stuck with Judgment multiplayer only for the franchise as GoW3 is from 2011. 
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Thankfully they’re not so I’ll be able to enjoy Horde & multiplayer on all the previous games that I loved for who knows how long (& a lot longer on the non server side)…& never play Judgment multiplayer again!
And you’re putting a fair amount of effort into defending them, but you joined in on suing them for anti-competitive practises like the ones I’m talking about? Lol dude.
What "loads" of sport licenses? The only exclusive deals they have are with the NFL, a deal brought up BY THE NFL! And I believe they are also exclusive with FIFA and the PGA, but thats clearly a win win as FIFA has dramatically gained in popularity and revenue. People think that EA just goes out and buys all these licenses when thats just not the case. Most often its the sport that brings up the idea of exclusivity.
They have tonnes of separate licenses with all the different bodies, leagues, & for individual club & national tournaments & even individual teams within the same sport. “FIFA” is only one football body. That’s why they can cover clubs & international teams from so many individual countries and leagues around the world. Also why they can make more than 1 game a year in the FIFA series. Regular FIFA, European Championships, World Cup, Road to World Cup, managerial games in various territories while others can’t touch those without changing the names for everything. Those are all separate licenses.
Pro evolution Soccer dominated football games for quite a while until FIFA finally put out a comparable quality game (was terrible before this gen) and then everyone jumped ship almost overnight because they had nearly all the licensed players & team around the world while Pro Evo had hardly any, although this has increased massively on earlier years but still nowhere near as many as FIFA has. Fact of UK football gaming history
I don’t know as much as you guys on how licensing works on US sports but it’s probably a lot easier to manage with only 1 main country, 1 or 2 governing bodies per sport? and less leagues to worry about. Even then don’t they have or at least had licenses for college football & basketball (don’t know about baseball). So a crazy number of “soccer” licenses (which is the only truly international sport at club level & licensing as a result complex), NFL, AFL & NCAA (maybe not any more), PGA Tour, Rugby Union, Australian Football, NASCAR (before it expired). They’ve had MLB rights in the past although lost out on them since. Also have non-exclusive licenses in nearly every other sport in the world which means other sports companies can only pay up and attack them on one or 2 sports at a time rather than provide actual overall competition. There’s probably more that I don’t know of/can’t think of but yeah in summary “loads” as in far far more than any other games company to the point where it is difficult to compete and many of those other companies have admitted so.
Kind of getting bored with being called out & doubted when I talk about this stuff so here’s a link on the licenses that PES managed to get for 2013 all of which were nothing compared to the number FIFA secured & this is isn't a simple case of those associations seeking EA out, but more to do with highest bidder wins.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...he-teams-in-spanish-and-italian-top-divisions
Konami has announced a raft of licensed teams for upcoming football game PES 2013 - 150 to be exact.
The Spanish league is included in its entirety alongside all the clubs from Italian league Serie A.
Konami has done individual deals with Manchester United, Bayern Munich, FC Porto, AEK Athens, Galatasaray Istanbul, Shahktar Donetsk, FC Kopenhagen, Zenit St Petersburg, CSKA Moscow, RSC Anderlecht, Dinamo Kyiv and Dinamo Zagreb, among others.
PES has for a number of years now included just a couple of licensed Premier League teams. This year it looks like only one, Manchester United, has been secured.
17 more national teams have been added, including England, Italy, Germany and France. Konami promised to announce more details on these soon.
Meanwhile, Konami has extended its exclusive agreement with UEFA for the use of the Champions League and UEFA Europa League for PES 2013.
In June European PES team leader Jon Murphy told Eurogamer that Konami can't compete with FIFA maker EA on licenses.
"There are obviously a lot of existing contacts between EA and who they deal with and a lot of trust between them, and there's a lot of money changing hands, and trying to break into those situations is very hard," he said. "At the same time it should be pretty obvious that we can't compete with the massive budgets they have to throw at these things.
"So, for example, with the Premier League, we've opened up negotiations with them in the past and we've got quite close to what we thought was a good offer. It went to EA exclusively. And then after that EA have been dealing directly with the clubs themselves to lock us out of individual club deals as well. So there are several layers we have to be trying to fight through."
You kind of blew a whole in your argument with your last sentence. IT MAKES MONEY. Meaning people are purchasing those packs, not because they have to, but because they want to. Those Ultimate team packs are wildly popular among the FIFA enthusiasts. You also cant blame EA for the hacking, thats on MS, not EA. EA cant help that their game is super popular and thus a target for hacking and theft.
And you kind of blew your argument in your 1st (2nd) sentence!
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(I am a FIFA enthusiast as are the vast majority of my friends)
Those packs are pay-to-make-progress instead of playing so of course they’re popular with all those who want to buy it, skip the grind and still have the best teams and unpopular with everyone else who wants a fair playing field, especially as the grind brought in to attain a top squad legit has been made artificially super-long to encourage more packs to be bought. This is crap for the regular FIFA players & for me it’s not even worth playing that mode at all now.
I think you’d understand this better if they did it on a game you liked (unless you also want to pay your way to victory). So to unlock the top weapons in a shooter that give a material advantage (like getting the top FIFA squad does), the developer introduces a massive grind but one that can be bypassed by paying multiple times to unlock access. Great and quite an advantage if you’re prepared to/can afford to pay and not fun if you’re not. Grinds in general for EA games will become longer as the company wants the norm to be that everyone pays or suffers. It’s monetising gaming in the wrong way unlike having unlimited microtransactions for skins & customizing your character/weapons in a non advantageous way that does no harm.
On "IT MAKES MONEY":
If the government started selling microtransactions enabling people to hit others they don’t like or steal money or force your employer to pay you double and the law would turn a blind eye, it would be extremely popular with all those who wanted to buy one and terrible for others!
If EA were govt this might be a possibility and when you call 999/911 it would take 2 hours for someone to understand (but not resolve) what the problem is.
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I’ve got plenty more to say on EA related issues (especially the hacking & EA support) that is relevant (& that I’ve just deleted) but I’ve gone on way too long already & we should probably kill this off asap so as not to piss everyone else off. 
Aside from the games themselves which are mostly good, my experiences with this company when there’s no developing studio like DICE underneath to help me out have been terrible. 
I thought it was what I was saying myself, the exclusivity only hurts the competition to EA like Konami and other attempted football games. And again all of this is not one of the points I’m actually trying to make, just a defence against getting called out (yet again) this time on EA not having a lot of licenses!
