ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
If someone you love is into sports, video games and sports video games, you might have a hard time reaching them this weekend. That's because the new game College Football 25 from EA Sports is out now.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The eyes of the nation are on this field today and that's what these players live for.
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LIMBONG: It's a big deal because for 11 years, there's been no official college football video game, despite demand from players. Here to tell us why and if this decade-plus wait is worth it is The Athletic's Chris Vannini. Thanks for being here, Chris.
CHRIS VANNINI: Yeah, thanks for having me.
LIMBONG: All right. You spent a lot of time with this new game, and I'll get to that in a second. But give us some gamer history first. Why were the NCAA football games so beloved in the first place?
VANNINI: It's such a unique experience with so many different teams and players and recruiting, the way you bring players into your program, and it was really a huge part of culture back in the day. Even though the real players were not officially in the game - they were given names like Quarterback No. 7 - their likeness was used in the game for many years, so players got to experience the real game. That turned out to be a problem because players weren't being compensated for that. But that is why the college football video game for a long time was so unique and special. It was different than Madden.
College football has so many different types of offenses, and they always have. So you've got way more creativity in different things you can do offensively in college football. That's how it is in real life, and that's how it was in the video game. And that's why the college football video game for many people was more fun than Madden. Even though Madden was the bigger seller, the more popular game, you could do so many more different things when you would play the game in college football.
LIMBONG: Yeah. Before, you mentioned this issue of college athletes not being paid for their name, image and likeness. Was that the reason why this game hasn't come out in over a decade?
VANNINI: Yes. The game went away 11 years ago because some former college athletes, notably Ed O'Bannon, had sued over the use of their name, image and likeness in the college football and college basketball video games, and EA sports said in legal filings at the time, hey, we're willing to pay players to, like, fix this. And the NCAA said, no, that violates our rules of amateurism. We're not going to let our athletes be used in this game. And it solely went away because the NCAA wouldn't let players make money off of their name, image and likeness.
LIMBONG: And so that rule about players not being paid for their name, image and likeness has since changed, right? And so now players are being paid a minimum of $600 - right? - a pop for their appearance in the game. Six hundred bucks, that's not nothing, but I think some could argue that's kind of a low number for a game that's pretty much guaranteed to bring in beaucoup bucks for EA sports, right? What's the response been from players and advocates about the payment?
VANNINI: Well, there's two different ways to look at it. One is that it's $600 plus a copy of the game if you want to include that in there. But the - one, for the vast majority of these players, this might be the only NIL deal they ever get, and so there are a lot of players making money that they wouldn't otherwise. For the top-end players, EA sports did also sign a lot of them to promotional deals. Ambassador deals, essentially, is what it's called - to promote the game on social media and in various things. The three cover athletes - Quinn Ewers at Texas, Donovan Edwards at Michigan and Travis Hunter at Colorado - they got another, you know, compensation on top of that for being on the cover.
Arch Manning, the nephew of Peyton Manning, who, it was reported a couple of months ago, had decided not to be in the game, last week said he would and released the video with EA sports, so he pretty clearly got paid to end up being in the game. So there were some advocates and activists on behalf of players who would say that they should boycott and ask for more, but that was never really going to happen. And if you ever talked to players, most of the players would say, I would do this for free.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
VANNINI: They just want to be in the video game. And so EA Sports kind of had that leverage a bit in terms of, like, players didn't want to be the ones to be left out of the game.
LIMBONG: So you've played it. Does it live up to the hype? Worth the wait? What are we thinking?
VANNINI: I think it does. It's not perfect. No game is perfect, but I think people wanted to have something that really feels like college football, and you really have to credit EA sports for getting so many environmental details right. Every single team, all 134 teams, is a different experience in this game. They've got their own introduction. They've got their own unique stadium setup. They've got their own fight songs and chants and music and stuff like that. And it doesn't feel like a reskin of Madden, which is something a lot of gamers have been concerned about because the feelings on Madden are very mixed. The sales are high, the reviews are low. But the people at EA Sports were really excited about college football because they got to make a new game from scratch again.
LIMBONG: That's Chris Vannini, senior college football reporter at The Athletic. Thanks for being here.
VANNINI: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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