It looked like EA Sports was planning to expand its horizons to college basketball in the wake of the success of its rebooted College Football franchise. However, the company has apparently decided to wave the white flag after getting outplayed by a competitor that already has a stranglehold on that particular sport.
The NCAA Football games were the most notable casualty of the Supreme Court ruling that essentially forced EA Sports to stop making college sports video games. However, O’Bannon v. NCAA, the case that served as the catalyst for that development, can trace its roots back to NCAA Basketball 09.
Ed O’Bannon, the power forward who played for the UCLA team that won a national championship in 1995, realized his likeness had been incorporated into the game without his permission (and without any compensation) and subsequently filed the lawsuit that led to EA Sports forking over $40 million in a settlement.
The developer could have theoretically continued to make college sports video games that didn’t harness the name, image, and likeness of actual student-athletes, but it opted to err on the side of caution and pull the plug.
That changed following the advent of the NIL Era, as the publisher got back *EA Sports Guy Voice* in the game when College Football 25 came out in 2024 to end a more than decade-long drought en route to becoming the best-selling video game of the year.
That also opened the door for the resurrection of the college basketball games that the company had stopped producing years before the antitrust case surfaced, and while we might be getting one in the near future, it won’t be the one responsible for making it.
EA Sports won’t make a college basketball game after getting outfoxed by 2K Sports
EA Sports made its initial foray into the college basketball lane when it produced Coach K College Basketball for the Sega Genesis in 1995, but it didn’t really commit until the first title in the NCAA March Madness franchise dropped three years later.
That was the first of a dozen annual releases in a series that was eventually rebranded as NCAA Basketball before it was abandoned following the release of the game that dropped in 2009, which featured Blake Griffin as a cover athlete.
At the time, the company also had another successful basketball franchise in the form of NBA Live, although it had slowly but surely started to lose its battle with the NBA 2K games. The former ceased to exist in the wake of the installment that dropped in 2018, and the latter hasn’t had any competition in the basketball space since then.
However, we were treated to an intriguing development at the end of June when EA Sports teased the grand return of a college basketball title.
Bring the Madness. Let’s run it back. #CBB #ItsInTheGame pic.twitter.com/iBNhGxn2yj
— EA SPORTS (@EASPORTS) June 30, 2025
That annoucement turned out to be slightly premature, as we eventually learned EA Sports was one of three companies that had submitted a bid to obtain a license to make a game It was only natural that Take Two (the company that oversees 2K Sports) was one of the others, although they reportedly planned to release their version as DLC for NBA 2K in an attempt to see if there would be enough interest to produced a standalone title.
Both of those competitors have been working behind the scenes to court the schools that would need to grant their permission to appear in a game, and according to what Matt Brown had to say in a recent post on Extra Points, EA Sports ended up getting outclassed.
Brown obtained a memo that the company sent to schools it was negotiating with to inform them that it was backing out of the race, saying:
Given there are some schools choosing to accept the 2K Sports proposal for inclusion in NBA 2K, the offer to be included in a college basketball video game will unfortunately have to be rescinded.
The NBA 2K franchise has attracted plenty of criticism over a decline in quality that undoubtedly stems from the complacency that comes with not having any real competition, and even though EA Sports has a rocky track record with basketball games, it would have been nice to see if anything would have changed.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case—just like it looks like 2K Sports doesn’t seem to be in any rush to make a college basketball game that’s separate from an NBA one.
The post EA Sports Is Abandoning Its Plans For A College Basketball Video Game After Getting Boxed Out By 2K appeared first on BroBible.
EA Sports Is Abandoning Its Plans For A College Basketball Video Game After Getting Boxed Out By 2K
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