They exist, especially on PC. But without the license, they're just not attractive. They often try to circumvent this by including an editor, so they could be modded in down the line, but that's a small market.

Otherwise, I'm sure you would have known about those games in the first place and not asked this question.

The unlicensed games typically aren’t amazing but some of them have been, but still just can’t compete with the brand power the league licenses provide. That’s why companies like 2k and EA and Sony are happy to pay them.

Lawsuits stopped the NCAA games from happening because of making money off unpaid amateur athletes likeness.

NFL should force EA to put Madden on Switch least once. Hell the Wii U got one Madden. Since they are only ones with contract I believe it states that they have to at least attempt a year on any viable system and the Switch has the user base.  I just remembered some BS about viable platforms to justify monopoly.  I guess they can just argue Madden doesn't sell on Nintendo systems.  Only mainline official sports game that sell decent enough copies would be FIFA and NBA2K on Switch.

Loved the Ken Griffey Jr baseball games of past though.

For people talking about Live being competition to NBA2K lol.  Didn't they give up again already?

To be fair, Sony didn't pay for the exclusive MLB license. The other MLB games just didn't sell, so they stopped making them.

Really, I think EA is the only company to make the license exclusive to them, which in my opinion is just BS. I would love a Backbreaker 2 with actual NFL teams. Or a new NFL 2K game.

EA is already pulling back FIFA on Switch and putting out a legacy edition this year. They actually supported the vita longer than they did the Switch.

IF FIFA sales aren't impressive to keep going, Madden sales don't stand a chance. And to be honest, that's pretty annoying to me, as Madden and NHL on Switch would be day 1 buys for me.

I don't think you know what a monopoly is. Any company can make a sports game just as well as EA or 2K. If they want to use official branding of real sports organizations, that's up to that organization. Maybe you should be asking if there should be easier ways to get new sports groups off the ground?

That's actually a very interesting situation there. The sports games are some of the biggest sellers in the industry, yet without the license many sports titles can't reach decent numbers, even to break even. Is it really the licenses and the faces on them that sell the game? Do the sports crowd really care that much about that?

The NFL's modus operandi was to have one licensed game, because if you have only one game then it's easier to regulate quality (Read: Revoke the license if it sucks). The NFL didn't want sub-par games with their name on it floating around, and 989's god-awful NFL GameDay series was a major culprit.

No, there's not much of a legal avenue to force professional sports leagues and unions to let other companies make games that utilize the likenesses of the players or names and logos of the teams. Certainly not using the examples in OP's post. Exclusive licenses like this do not represent a monopoly, nor do they represent unfair business practices. And you, as a fan, do not have standing to argue brand damage.

And as far as spite goes, the simple fact is, even if FIFA chose to offer a license to another developer, you're simply not going to get an EA FIFA competitor on Switch that remotely matches the quality of PS4 and XBox. The Switch's limitations were always going to result in things like this, and it will get worse as the 9th generation begins in earnest.

Yes. Licenses make all of the difference. I used to work on a sports game where there were two main competing products. To try and give you an idea of how important licenses are, we spent more on licenses than we did on developing the game itself. We had exclusive licenses for about 80% of the leagues/countries, and the other company had exclusive rights to the other 20%, but that 20% contained about 50% of the best national teams/leagues in the world. So it meant that for the biggest tournament in the sport, our game would have had every national team that was competing except two, and their game would only having those two. We tried to trade exclusivity so we could both released games that had the licensing for all of the teams, but we couldn't work out a deal. As a result, game sales for both games combined were about 40% lower than they were for the last major tournament where both game series featured all teams. Fans were pissed, and both products suffered as a result.