March Clark Madness ended yesterday and UConn will host back-to-back games tonight. There's only about a month left until the EA launch EA Sports College Football 25 For all of us, we feel this is the perfect time to remind everyone that college sports is the ultimate sports video game.
It's easy to forget, but right now there's a large generation of people who have never played a college sports video game. A lot has changed in video games and college sports in the decade-plus we've been waiting for the return of college sports, but the reason why video games and college sports blend so well remains the same.
College Sports is the ultimate sports video game
Recruitment is the key
Recruitment is the Rosetta Stone to this entire discussion. This explains a lot about why college sports work. Because while it's just one aspect of him in his one mode in these games, it serves to explain why these games are so good for the professional game.
You compete to get recruits. Build a team around new employees. A short season means you're basically always recruiting for next year. And all of these new employees are fake after a certain point. The basis of the diversity that exists in the college sports video game is recruiting. This is the kind of diversity that professional gaming can never match. Because it will be years before professional leagues are filled with the same number of fake players.
Yes, you could create an imaginary league to get around this, but that would be a lot of work and it's not genuine which one. The inherent knowledge we have about pro teams is hard to shake, no matter how much we try to pretend it doesn't exist. LeBron James has played 21 seasons. Patrick Mahomes has played seven seasons. This kind of player sticks to everything, even our video games. Such problems do not exist in college video games. Until the whole league is new, you'll have to worry about Year 1 to maybe He's Year 5 (or maybe He's Year 6). After a certain point, everything becomes a blank slate and all that remains is the glitz and history of the school itself.
The shorter the better
Let's think about this differently and talk about season length.
-A college football season is about 13 games at most. An NFL season is a minimum of 17 games.
-The college basketball season is 40 games at the high end. An NBA season is at least 82 games long.
-The college baseball season has approximately 55 games until the postseason. An MLB season is 162 games.
You can go through a 162-game season in MLB and come back the next season with about 75% of the same roster. No matter how much I love MLB games, it can be exhausting. Even though 162 games isn't long for him already, continuing to play without a ton of simulation to keep things going demands a lot from himself.
You can sum it up with the tried-and-true adage, “Variety is the spice of life,” but the comparison between college sports and professional sports is the best example of how shortening everything helps video games. And that's appealing to me, because I don't really like college sports. I'd rather he watch an MLB, NBA, or NFL game than a college game. I'm not saying that everyone is like that, but I just want to emphasize that even with my bias, I recognize college sports video games to be the best video games.
The importance of intangibles
Another way to look at this, which is a little less specific, is that I think college sports video games need to be better than professional video games. I think the NFL and NBA sell video games themselves in a way that college sports can't rely on in the same way. That's not the case this year because everyone is hungry for college video games, but don't get me wrong. EA Sports College Football 2025 This is the only version where some quality is inherited. After this year, if the games aren't good, they won't sell as well as NFL games. To continue to be successful, Madden has to be the way it never was.
We've seen this before with an example where College Hoops 2K was a great game, but ultimately wasn't yet worthy of being featured on 2K Sports. Quality alone is still not enough to generate yearly sales, but if the games aren't great, they don't stand a chance.
And thanks to dedicated people, there's even a level of reliability that developers can achieve with these college games that professional games can't reach. Yes, both can imitate broadcast presentations, but college fight songs and chants and all the other collegiate chaos aren't as good as the walk-up music of over 900 MLB players or all the licensed music. It's much easier to license and reproduce it than it is to obtain it. will be played in each NBA arena to fill that soundscape.
Rather than making a near-empty Bank of America Stadium feel special during a late-season Carolina Panthers game, having just over 100,000 people at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge is a unique stadium. It's easier to create experiences. That doesn't mean it's easy to create a college experience, but what's the point of filming when you know it's cheaper to get the licenses you need to create special moments at college games? It's easy to know.
At this point, there are so many people who have never played a college sports game that some people may not believe what I write, and that's understandable.But I hope everyone will give EA Sports College Football 25 Even people who barely watch college football will give it a shot just to experience this phenomenon firsthand and start beating the drum for bringing more college video games back into our lives.
