EA Sports Passes on AFL License Renewal

According to the Sports Business Journal, EA Sports has decided against renewing the license with the Arena Football League. That leaves the AFL without any gaming company to produce a licensed product on its behalf.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that EA would pass on continuing their partnership with the AFL. They produced two sub-par offerings on the PS2 and Xbox and never showed any indications that they would be making a game for any of the current generation of systems. The Arena games didn’t sell well and the sequel (Road to Glory) had very little effort put into it. The AFL games pretty much mirrored the path taken by the MVP College Baseball games.

With the license now open the opportunity is there for another company to grab it. I’m not sure if it is appealing enough for anyone to jump on right away, though one would imagine that the AFL is looking more for exposure than money out of a deal and it wouldn’t necessarily need to be a huge investment to secure the license. The question is whether the cost of development can justify the sales that an Arena game can produce.