Of late, it’s been looking extremely inevitable that EA and FIFA’s licensing partnership of nearly three decades is going to come to an end. Late last year, EA confirmed that it was considering renaming its FIFA franchise as it looked to end its licensing agreement with the football organization. Now, it seems like that’s going to happen soon.
In a recent episode of Giant Bomb show GrubbSnax (via ResetEra), journalist Jeff Grubb stated that EA will indeed soon be renaming its FIFA franchise. With their licensing deal expiring with this year’s game, Grubb says EA will instead rename the series as EA Sports FC (the “FC” stands for “football club”, in case you’re wondering), while FIFA will instead go ahead with its own football games- though whether they’re on the lookout for other developers to partner with remains to be seen.
If that names sounds familiar to you, that’s because last year, EA registered trademarks for EA Sports FC.
Reports in October of last year suggested that not only was FIFA asking EA for $2.5 billion every four years to extend their agreement, but was also looking to place restrictions on in-game monetization. More recently, EA said that its FIFA license has actually precluded the company from expanding the franchise in the ways that it wants to.
How exactly would this affect EA Sport’s yearly football sim series though? Effectively, the only thing they’d be losing out on is the FIFA World Cup license itself- licensing for every other international team, club, player, and stadium that’s already in the FIFA games will remain largely unaffected. Read more on that through here.