Last week, EA announced that they are considering renaming its FIFA football series of video games to something else. Given that FIFA is an actual real-life organization, we imagine that this could be due to licensing issues, and it turns out that we might be right.
According to a report from The New York Times, there is apparently a bit of a dispute going on between EA and FIFA over the cost and new revenue streams from the game. It seems that FIFA wants to charge EA a whopping $1 billion every four years if they want to keep using the name, and this is said to be double the amount it used to cost.
FIFA also seems to be looking to limit how much EA can monetize the game. The report claims that FIFA is fine with EA monetizing what can already be found in the game, but it seems that EA is exploring monetizing other aspects like highlights of the game, arena tournaments, digital products like NFTs, and so on, all of which FIFA seems to be a bit reluctant against.
This is the disagreement that led to EA’s announcement last week. Nothing has been set in stone yet, but as IGN has discovered that EA had trademarked the “EA Sports FC” name, there is a good chance that this could be the new name of the series if neither side can come to an agreement.