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...
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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.
