When I first woke up this morning, I was expecting to cover some breaking news, run some simulations, and share my thoughts on some current events in sports gaming. I was also looking forward to the gameplay reveal for College Football 26, one of the most hyped games of the year. What I wasn’t expecting was for EA to come out of nowhere and announce that it was bringing back its College Basketball series.
This morning, the official EA Sports X account announced the return of the long-dormant College Basketball series:
The last time college basketball fans had a video game based on the sport was way back in 2009 with the release of NCAA Basketball 10. After that, several issues contributed to the series’ eventual discontinuation.
For one, NCAA Basketball 10 didn’t sell all too well. And when a game doesn’t sell, it’s hard to justify pumping dev power and money required to make a functioning game. On top of that, EA was massively struggling in the basketball market by 2010. Not only had 2K’s NBA series fully eclipsed the NBA Live games in terms of sales, but the quality of the NBA Live games had garnered massive criticism for its poor mechanics and would only see some sporadic releases throughout the next decade.
With the publisher struggling to simply get one basketball game out the door — one that was fully licensed by the NBA and had professional teams in it — EA simply couldn’t justify working on a second.
But, since the massive release of College Football 25 and the implementation of things such as NIL, the market has shown that there is a massive appetite for college sports in video games. And when it comes to college sports, few things (if any) are better than March Madness!
