Image credit: EA Sports
It’s silly, really, how much people love immersing themselves in the world of video games.
I say that because I count myself as one of those people. As far as lives go, mine is rather unremarkable. So, I don’t mind indulging in a bit of escapism from time to time, especially if it has something to do with my favorite sport. In the real world, for example, I stopped playing competitive football after high school. But according to my PlayStation, I run a 4.58 40, can throw a football a cool 65 yards and am a three-time Heisman Trophy winner.
Like so many of my contemporaries born in the 1990s, I spent an embarrassingly large amount of my childhood and early adolescence playing EA Sports’ NCAA Football series. I was never skilled in first-person shooters like Call of Duty or patient enough to excel in open-world fantasies like The Elder Scrolls, but I managed to carve out a comfortable niche for myself as a capable player of sports simulation games. I still have fond memories of the many create-a-players and national championship-winning programs I produced from the basement of my childhood home, and I can still hear the steady hum of computer-generated crowd noise and a random school’s fight song that would often serenade me to sleep. Simpler times.
A lot has changed since then. I rarely play those games anymore, in large part because the series was discontinued shortly after the release of NCAA Football 14 in 2013. But like the infamous Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, EA Sports pulled me back in.
I’m talking about, of course, the July 19 release of EA Sports College Football 25, EA’s highly anticipated reboot of its original NCAA Football franchise. Beyond being the long-awaited nudge I needed to pick up the controller again (or, as the kids say, get back on ‘the sticks’) and relive my childhood dreams, this game was college football’s grand re-entrance into the gaming universe after over a decade of dormancy. Yeah, it’s a pretty big deal.
So, what can EA Sports College Football 25 teach us beyond my incredibly fascinating personal gaming journey? A little (well, really big) thing called the world of brand publishing and content strategy. The game didn’t just emerge out of nowhere to captivate the nation; it took a developer with a clear vision, a whole lot of determination and a commitment to giving consumers the most authentic experience possible.
Take The Time To Do It Right
Eleven years between installments is an eternity in the gaming world, especially for sports franchises that typically release a new version of the same game annually. Prior to its pause in production, EA published a new college football game yearly from 1993 to 2013, developing a regular cadence to which its loyal fanbase quickly grew accustomed.
But this prolonged hiatus wasn’t all on EA Sports. NCAA Football was shelved not because of the game’s declining popularity or the developer’s demise, but because of a lawsuit against the NCAA challenging its use of college athletes’ likenesses for commercial purposes, including in video games. When a judge ruled against the NCAA in 2014, it forced EA to hit pause on its signature line of college sports games.
All the while, consumer demand for a college football video game never wavered. In fact, I’d argue that the longer fans went without a new version of the game, the stronger that demand became. I know I spent many of those “lost” seasons watching and wondering what it would have been like to play with video game versions of the many legendary players and elite teams that passed through the sport. Some people (with much more time on their hands) even got creative, continuously modifying NCAA Football 14 to reflect more modern rosters.
You get the picture now? This put EA in quite an unusual predicament. However, according to ESPN, once enough time had passed, and name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules had shifted enough to make reviving the franchise a real possibility, the company was ready. By the time EA publicly announced the game’s eventual return in early 2021, it had already spent over a year laying the groundwork for the new product. It then took the next three to get it across the finish line.
EA’s patient approach paid off. It sold 2.2 million copies of College Football 25’s deluxe edition before the game’s full release on July 19. For comparison, NCAA Football 14 sold a total of roughly 1.5 million copies.
All that is to say, EA took the time to do it right. It didn’t rush to market with a hastily built, recycled game that left its loyal fanbase unsatisfied; it essentially constructed a new game “from scratch” that hit all the right buttons of tradition and nostalgia while carrying enough new features and sleek graphics to appeal to the modern gamer.
I know the pressure to create content can sometimes produce a frenzied approach to brand publishing. There’s often a sense that more content produced at a higher frequency equals better results. But as EA demonstrates, sometimes it pays to operate at a more deliberate pace if it means delivering impactful, quality content that your core audience will love.
Authenticity Matters
There’s a reason why it took over five years from the initial project pitch to College Football 25’s release date for EA to complete this massive undertaking. It’s all about the details.
EA understood from the outset that fans play its college football games because they feel like the real thing. They pay their hard-earned money for an immersive experience. To give them that, EA couldn’t afford to cut any corners, even if it meant spending long hours researching traditions, compiling touchdown celebrations, perfecting uniforms or acquiring assets from each of the 134 FBS schools.
The development team constructed entire stadiums – nearly 150 in all – using a sophisticated lighting system and custom “toolkits” to accurately replicate each school’s real-life home venue. Each took about a week to build, and that was before crowds were added. There were the mascots (Colorado’s buffalo, Ralphie, took nearly a month to animate), the playbooks (unique to each team), the fight songs and the in-game commentary (more than 115 hours worth recorded remotely over two years). And, of course, there were the players.
More than 13,000 athletes “opted in” to have their NIL used for College Football 25 in exchange for $600 cash and a free copy of the game. (Sounds like a sweet deal, right?) Using machine learning software, EA animated each player’s appearance and adjusted his player ratings to build out entire 85-person rosters true to all 134 teams. Every eye color, player bio and football attribute accounted for. All of this, and we haven’t even talked about the actual gameplay!
It’s no wonder that, according to ESPN, the phrase “authenticity is the foundation” became the common refrain among the game’s developers. This was EA’s vision from day one, recognizing that it had the time and motivation to obsess over every granular detail.
And therein lies the rub: When it comes to building a trusted, authoritative brand, authenticity matters. That’s true for brand publishing, SEO marketing or even reinventing a popular video game franchise after a long pause in production. It requires time, resources, strategy and careful execution. But as long as you’re committed to delivering for your core audience, you’ll always be in championship contention.
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