Recently, Jeff Grubb, a well-known foreign whistleblower, broke the news in his video program that the football game "FIFA23" owned by Electronic Arts (EA) will be renamed "EA Sports Football Club" or "EA Sports FC", and that this new name has been used within EA.
Previously, the "Pro Evolution Soccer (PES)" series, which is a competitor to the "FIFA" series, has been renamed "eFootball" one step ahead. Konami originally wanted to reverse the decline of the series by changing the free operating model + renaming, but in fact this name change was a failure.
"eFootball 2022" experienced the biggest crisis in history, due to the game's quality control problems, graphics distortion bugs frequently, so that the new game quickly became the most badly reviewed game on Steam at that time.
The new name "eFootball" naturally stinks, and it has not changed its life. Some players found that Konami had registered a new trademark "Pro Powerful Soccer" in Australia on March 15, which is very similar to the original name "Pro Evolution Soccer", and it is not excluded that Konami regretted it and wanted to change back to the name that was more familiar with the original players.
In the case of such competitors helping themselves to trial and error in advance, it seems unnecessary for EA to decide to rename FIFA. According to common sense, for a long time, football games in the game market have always been live and FIFA have accounted for half of the sky, the live itself is not good, players have no choice, there are many people who defected to the EA side, EA sits on the profits of the fisherman, as long as the quality of the new work is slightly improved, or even a little unchanged, like this new year game itself can make steady profits every year.
However, according to uncle Grubb, EA is not a whim to change its name, but because of the problem of money. Because the official authorization given by FIFA (Fifa) to EA is not given in vain, the licensing fee for your game can be under the banner of "FIFA". EA did not want to continue to pay FIFA's expensive licensing fees, so it wanted to terminate its cooperation with FIFA, so the game needed to be renamed. And the rumors of the name change surfaced last year, and EA applied for the trademark "EA Sports FC" in October 2021, so the probability of this wave of FIFA23 name changes is indeed very high.
Notably, Grubb also mentioned that the EA side was able to make this decision because they believed that the players were coming for the game, not the FIFA name. As soon as this statement came out, it was immediately ridiculed by players.
On the market, you and Konami are doing the head soccer game, Konami pulls the crotch, the player either does not play or can only play your EA, there is no choice. And the reason why the "FIFA" series can attract more players than "Pro Evolution Soccer" is largely because you have the official name of FIFA, first of all, there is a World Cup authorization, and secondly, it is easier to talk about cooperation with various league teams, and get more real team names, icons and real face modeling of players. Now you EA feel that players are coming for their own signboards, and it is inevitable that some of them have excess self-confidence.
I hope that the news of this uncle party is accurate enough, FIFA and EA if they break up, it is bound to find a new developer willing to give the licensing fee to develop the game, maybe the 2K of the NBA game will come to intervene, breaking the status quo that the two football games have been eating the old, there are more manufacturers participating in the competition, the speed of game quality improvement is accelerated, who does a good job to play who, which is definitely a good thing for the player.
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