And have the lack of license prohibit anyone from making a football game or just can impact the sales? Last I remember Fifa Street and the basketball version both did great without having any license, Mario Strikers also did well. PES and Winning Eleven done good. Gen 6 Soccer game had no license at all and still were hits.

Is that the contract no one ever saw but claim to be true?

Or do you have a copy of the contract?

Define how the contract put viable platform... all cellphones, Ouya, PS2, Mega Drive, and several others can be seem as viable... or low sales (like 110k on Switch) can be seem as non viable.

And NFL should shred the contract and stop making money because? And are you also aware that the NFL (or also FIFA) doesn't have the rights over the teams, players and stadiums right? So they also need to make deals with other entities to use their image.

Also funny enough in Brazil people were modding PES to have Brazil teams and championship and selling over here as well.

Name 1 American Football game released after 1990 that sold well without the NFL license.  There is a reason that Take-Two completely abandoned releasing American Football games after losing the NFL license.  They gave it a go with All-Pro 2K8 and saw their sales drop off a cliff.  Madden used to have competition for American Football video game sales.  No American Football game has sold over a million copies without the NFL license.  With EA holding exclusive NFL license, it now has a monopoly on the genre.

I think Midway might have been the last to even try, and here was the reception:

Companies aren't obtuse... the most likely reason for no support from EA to Switch and timid investiment are risk aversion and market analysis pointing to low profit on the ports;

And how does that forbid anything? It may not make it sucessfull, that is the job of the developer to make it be wanted.

I would say the Madden name was even more relevant than NFL back in the time, as well as Joe Montana version.

Sure it will take effort, probably more effort than just having the license.

Still people are wanting EA to put effort to make a Switch version that will sell 110k and suddenly, making the game without license to sell that isn't good?

EA owns exclusive rights to the NFL.  So how the fuck are you going to launch a NFL game on the Switch?  Sorry meant to respond to DonFerrari

You don't seem to understand the core of his statement.

Unlicensed American Football games don't sell. At all. There's a reason why nobody makes them anymore, the earnings wouldn't be enough to cover the development costs. The only other american football game that does sell well is blood bowl, which replaces the teams with Warhammer 40k factions and ups the roughness up the ante, and the rules are used pretty liberally.

And for your association football (or soccer or just plain football, whatever you prefer) examples: PES has licenses, just not as many as the fifa series, and as a results sells much worse than Fifa. It did well last decade when the licenses where on par and the gameplay was more important, but now no matter how good PES would get they still wouldn't be able to compete with Fifa unless EA royally screws up the license. Mario Strikers went in a whole different direction, only caring about the base rules. It's still a sports game, but in no way a sports simulation like Fifa - and still can't nearly compete with Fifa. As a result of not being a simulation like Fifa it attracts a totally different crowd, too (though there certainly are crossovers).

Is football limited to NFL? As far as I know besides the college leagues you can also go the way PES done in the past, even before Winning Eleven, and not license the game... I believe Sega done it as well for some sports and T2K.

The NFL license belongs to NFL and they may sell the right to use to anyone they want and since you don't own NFL or its license what would be your ground for the class action? "I want to play this game on this console and I can't so they own me 1M USD"?

Did you ignored the part that during 5 and 6th gen there were a lot of soccer games that had 0 license and sold good? I'm not ignoring the part that without license would be hard to make it meet the sales... But here we are with people being so entitled that they want to complain about the port, sue the company to lose the right to do the game alone and also demand that company to keep making the port even if they won't buy. Don't you see anything strange on it?

No one is allowed to make NCAAF games anymore. There was some lawsuit against using the likeness of players or something. I can't remember exactly. College sports games are extinct.

That's normal due to how licensing worked at the time.

At the time there didn't exist an unified Fifa license - you had to license every club, every stadium and every single player separately - twice in fact for the players, once for the naming rights and once for the visuals (which costed a lot more than just the names, hence why in the early 3D Fifas the players had the correct names, but didn't look anything like their namesakes). I could even dig into my pile of german PC Games magazines to find the article which explained the problem in great detail. Of course, taking such a huge amount of different licenses was a real nightmare and generally just wasn't worth it, hence why most soccer games at the time didn't have any licensing at all.

I do agree on the rest (apart from complaining about the port, as it could have been done much better and, as a result, would certainly also have sold better), that's just... bad sportsmanship.

I was talking about not using any license.

Well yes lincensing was a nightmare at the time. That was just to point that not having doesn't necessarily makes success impossible, but sure that after having licenses it will be harder to succeed without it.

On complaining about the port in a constructive way and having it improve is valid, but unfortunatelly we know that a lot of the complains are for the sake of complaining and the people didn't buy the game and wouldn't buy even if it have all they requested. Also we get those remarks that Nintendo gamers don't like these bad games... so in the end it look more like checklist to justify a failure... Still I understand Nintendo gamers not buying Fifa and CoD, I also don't do that, but I wouldn't request they to be released as well.

I want a Madden NFL game on Nintendo Switch because I would buy it.  I bought Madden 13 on Wii U.  Even though it didn't have the current engine the other platforms got, the ability to pick plays on the gamepad and draw my own hot routes and blitzes at the line of scrimmage was the far superior experience for me.  When EA dropped support and refused to bring another Madden title to Wii U, they lost me as a customer.  Instead of continuing to buy the annual installments on Xbox One, I just kept playing my Madden 13 for all these years.  Up until then, I had been buying Madden releases on SNES, Genesis, PlayStation 1 & 2, Xbox 360...  Now that EA has flat out ignored an entire platform(s) for 5 consecutive years, they have lost 5 years of business from me.  I'm probably not the only one either.  There is "0" reason not to put a single Madden NFL title on Nintendo Switch right now.  The system is hot.  It is considered "the tech purchase" of this holiday season.  EA is withholding sales from themselves, eroding their customer base (of people like me) and contributing to the devaluing of the NFL product by not having a presence on all systems (especially the system most in demand in the NFL's market, NA).  I point to Madden's slumping sales this year.  The first year that Madden sales in over 15 years that didn't break a million first week.  And no, I don't buy the excuse that "the customers weren't lost, they've just gone digital".  Look at Fifa's trend:

Fifa 16 (PS4 1st week):  2.7 million
Fifa 17 (PS4 1st week):  4.4 million
Fifa 18 (PS4 1st week):  4.3 million

Annual sports games have a very short shelf life.  A lot of the people who buy Madden and Fifa buy the physical copy so they can trade it in before the next one comes out and get at least something back in return.  You can't do that with digital.  Hence why Fifa's sales haven't gone down with the rise of digital distribution, they've actually increased significantly. 

Lastly, Madden needs to be on all systems, because the NFL isn't a worldwide sport.  All of it's teams are based in the USA.  The NA market makes up 70% of Madden game sales.  The Switch is hot in NA right now, that's why it makes the most sense.  But, as it's test game, EA releases a game whose 73% of its sales comes from the Switch's weakest market (Europe)?  Come on.