Let me get this straight....
EA releases broken patch and in 1 week they have done nothing about it. How is this acceptable to them? Do they have any standards? The game currently feels like early access. It lags, it has missin...
Forum Discussion
Twitch viewership in early November was down 60% compared to last year, that's very significant. Eki, the biggest streamer recently quit because of how the overall viewership dropped off thus affecting his money and not making it worth his time. A few others have followed. Even if you don't like streamers, they are part of the community and can be a great marketing tool but the team this year killed off the the majority casual fanbase in exchange for for a very small META abusing fanbase.
Contacting the NHL wouldn't do anything. It's a partnership between NHL, NHLPA and EA. The only change that could happen would be if 2K sports actually saw potential in an NHL series and negotiated rights that take away exclusivity from EA.
EA doesn't have exclusive rights to the NHL or NHLPA. Any other company that wants to put out a competing product is free to negotiate its own deal with one or both of them. The fact that nobody has in years just speaks to the size of the market for NHL video games.
It's exclusive.
It isn't... there's nothing in EA's agreements with NHL & NHLPA that prevent another company from negotiating it's own agreement and making a licensed NHL game. No one has been willing to do so since 2K stopped making NHL games years ago. I'm not sure if that, as PlayoffError suggested, is due to the size of the market for hockey sims, or due to the enormous cost of developing a AAA game from scratch, or (most likely) both.
Its both. Market for a hockey game is probably not large enough to make it attractive for a new developer to jump into. Plus EA mitigates a lot of those risks by being a large company already established in the market. They can afford licenses and share resources/technology amongst their sports franchises to offset the cost. I would be curious to see what a serious competitor could do, if only to help put how good/bad the NHL series is in a clearer context.
