EA Sports Pulls Plug on College Basketball Revival

College basketball fans hoping for the sport’s long-awaited video game comeback are going to have to wait even longer. According to a report originally done by Extra Points and later covered by the New York Times, EA Sports has officially rescinded its proposal to create a standalone college basketball title, citing schools choosing to work with rival publisher 2K instead.

According to a memo obtained by Extra Points, EA Sports vice president of commercial partnerships and licensing Sean O’Brien confirmed that the company would no longer pursue the project. “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for inclusion in NBA 2K, the offer to be included in a college basketball video game will unfortunately have to be rescinded,” O’Brien said in the memo.

EA had pitched a full-scale college basketball revival earlier this summer, promising that all 730 men’s and women’s Division I teams, NIL payments for athletes, and popular features like Dynasty mode, Team Builder, Road to Glory, and Ultimate Team. The plan mirrored the approach taken with the recently revived College Football series, which has catapulted itself to being the most popular sports video game series in North America.

But without exclusivity across Division I, EA backed off.

The Future Of College Basketball Games

So, with EA now pulling out of the deal to create its own standalone basketball game, what’s the future for college basketball video games? At the moment, it doesn’t look like any such endeavor from either of the big sports game publishers — EA and 2K — is likely.

While EA’s plans were scuttled by 2K’s offers to select schools, the keyword in that phrase is “select.” From the looks of it, 2K has made no offers to include every Division I school, one of the reasons why the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) was so enthusiastic about EA’s offer, which did include every D1 school. Therefore, if 2K is only reaching out to certain schools, it’s likely that they’re only in search of a handful or so college teams to feature in an upcoming NBA 2K game, which has been done before in the series.

Given all of the reports we currently have access to, it doesn’t look like 2K will be reviving the College Hoops series any time soon. Exclusivity giveth, exclusivity taketh away, I guess. But hey, it’s early days — things can always change in the future. Just don’t get your hopes up

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