

Rejection, tragedy and billions of dollars – The story of FIFA Video Games - muratmutlu
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/rejection-tragedy-and-billions-of-dollars-the-story-of-fifa/0120299

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brianbreslin
Its fascinating to look back at the origins of this game. I remember getting
hooked on FIFA98 on the playstation. I would venture to say the hardcore fans
of FIFA each have dropped over $500+ lifetime on buying new versions of the
game. Some easily $1k+ ($60/year over 10+ years).

I am surprised no one has built a truly good link between fantasy sports and
FIFA/Madden or other sports franchises. Despite both being multi-billion
industries, they still seem siloed from each other.

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muratmutlu
Totally agree, I've probably spent around that.

What's really interesting is where the game started and where it is now, and
what FIFA 2023 might be like.

I posted this question on Quora and got a response from a former employee,
here's what he said

"In 20 years time, FIFA will advance towards the real sport as much possible -
in both aesthetics and emotion. Where it will be exactly depends on how much
the technology advances in parallel.

Graphically it will go down the way it has always been going down - more
polygons and well scanned faces. Unless FIFA regulates that the pitch be a
virtual hologram, there's really no other options for a football game to go in
direction other than real life. Maybe bigger fireworks.

Emotion and Gameplay is probably where you will see the biggest difference.
One of the biggest problem in FIFA right now is that the game still has to
live within the restriction of the 17-button current-gen controllers. These
controllers don't have enough fidelity to replicate what you want the player
to do. It's actually impressive that EA Canada has been able to replicate
football to this level by only using 17 buttons in FIFA 13."

[http://www.quora.com/Electronic-Arts-company/What-will-
the-c...](http://www.quora.com/Electronic-Arts-company/What-will-the-console-
game-Fifa-by-EA-Sports-look-like-20-years-from-now)

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fsckin
For a long while I thought FIFA wasn't a 'big' game at all, not worth my time.
Turns out I was pretty wrong. If not already, FIFA is close to a billion
dollar per year franchise.

"For this first game EA had to go without [licensing]. And so the dev team
decided to put themselves in the game. Matt Webster went upfront for England.
Joey Della-Savia was in the Italian squad. Assistant producer Marc Aubanel
became a striker for French team."

Humble beginnings, indeed.

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f137
And Don Mattrick was fielded for Ukraine :) It was fifa94 if I remember right

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kailuowang
Having been a football fan for almost 20 years, I am not sure if this is a sad
thing but playing Fifa is starting to give me more pleasure in enjoying
football than watching games. Part of the reason is that in FIFA, controllers
can see clearer the whole field than the limited vision real players have in
the real world, so that often times controllers can make more creative plays
provide that the AI controlling the teammates making interesting runs.

Now that I said that, I realized that creating such AI might be even more fun
than the above two.

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muratmutlu
I'm starting to feel that way too, if I'm immersed in Fifa 13 now I can't
imagine what Fifa 2023 will be like

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landryraccoon
The real question for me is, how did an American company beat every European
company to publish the leading FIFA game franchise, when the corporate culture
was so hostile to the idea? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that whatever
hostility US corporate culture had towards football, there was some countering
factor in European culture otherwise a company on the continent would have
published a better one.

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muratmutlu
Konami has the Pro Evolution series which was better than FIFA up until 3/4
years ago when EA completely changed the game mechanics.

I can't ever recall any European publishers making any hit football games, not
sure why. You probably won't see any for a long time either such is EA and
Konami's dominance

I actually haven't played any football games on a console in the last 6 years
that haven't been either Konami or EA.

Sega Virtua Striker went from arcade to console but never took off.

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enqk
In the old days, Europe was mostly playing on home computers such as the Atari
and the Amiga.

There Dino Dini's Kick off 1 and 2 and Sensible soccer where the leading
games. They did not however license directly from FIFA.

Football Manager is a strategy game that is still running, and still very
succesfull in its niche.

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oscillator
Before the Atari and Amiga, too, there were games like Match Day on the ZX
Spectrum and Commodore 64 (quite a decent, playable game) and Kevin Toms's
"Football Manager" (written in BASIC and goals shown in isometric 3D) from
1982, which precedes the current football manager games. Here's an interview
with Toms from 2010: [http://theballisround.co.uk/2010/07/29/the-original-
gamefath...](http://theballisround.co.uk/2010/07/29/the-original-gamefather/)

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mccolin
I spent many many many hours of my youth playing that game. It was so
groundbreaking for its time and just so much fun to play!

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chrismealy
Does anybody else have favorite versions? I really loved FIFA 99.

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sachitgupta
FIFA 2001 with Paul Scholes on the cover. Spent many days playing 10+ hours
till computer access was taken away :) Fond memories!

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tejaswiy
Can we keep out the usual discussion about the game dev work culture from this
one?

What EA did there was pretty inspiring.

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lotharbot
I don't think this story is as much about game dev work culture as it is about
cultural blinders. American bosses simply had no idea about the market for
what one guy called "proper football".

