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potato_hamster on 16 June 2019
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Darwinianevolution said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

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.

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?

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.