The FIFA World Cup begins next week; being hosted by Germany, arguably the world’s most exciting sporting event has the world waiting with bated breath. It’s anybody’s game this year, as a whole lot of teams seem primed to take the top spot and become world champions for the next four years. EA Sports, however, reckons that it has the answer, as it has predicted that Germany will win the tournament and become world champions, also becoming the first European nation to win in South America in the process.

To arrive at this conclusion, EA Sports used the 2014 FIFA World Cup video game (available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and predicted that Germany and Brazil would make the finals, with the former emerging victorious 2-1.

The entire thing might sound a bit amusing, but EA Sports does have a bit of a track record with these things- four years ago, for example, they accurately predicted that Spain would win the 2010 South Africa FIFA World Cup. If their prediction is validated again, it’ll be a ringing endorsement of their FIFA videogames.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup video game released only on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, bafflingly foregoing a release on Xbox One and PlayStation 4; EA announced last week that they would sort of make up for that by releasing a FIFA World Cup Ultimate Team Mode for FIFA 14. But now, they have gone a step ahead and announced that the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the game will be getting a free World Cup Mode that will be patched into the game next week. That’s a surprisingly good and consumer friendly move by EA, especially considering they could have just sold the mode as DLC and gotten away with it to a degree.

The FIFA World Cup mode will be completely authentic- it will feature all 32 national teams playing in the tournament, as well as the official match ball. It’s going to be a bit more limited than 2014 FIFA World Cup (obviously), but on the whole, it should serve as a nice consolation price to those who have moved on to the PS4 and Xbox One entirely for their FIFA needs.

[Video Gamer]

EA Sports’ FIFA World Cup tie in videogame, 2014 FIFA World Cup, will not be coming to the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4, instead hitting only the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It was a baffling decision, and one that EA itself seems to regret.

“So we started off with the initial concept and the thought that it would be a across both of those [console generations] but then as things progressed, it became a decision that we have only a certain amount of resources and we need to focus those resources to get to the most people as we possibly can,” producer Matthew Prior told Sportra.com.

“Nobody wanted to make a gen-4 title more than me, believe me, I mean it was disappointing in that sense but at the same time it was the right decision in terms of getting it to the most people,” explained Prior. For reference, EA calls the Xbox One and PS4 ‘gen 4 consoles’ (they are, in fact, eighth generation consoles, but let’s not tell EA that).

“Once the numbers started rolling in that’s way too late in the cycle for us to make a decision, because these games are massive, they take a lot of effort,” said Prior.

“Unfortunately we weren’t really able to react to that increased uptake, I think everybody was taken aback pleasantly by how many people bought the consoles. So I think it was a kind of good news story in that event, but unfortunately it was at a time where it passed where we could do a proper product.

“You know, you could have potentially rushed one out, or whatever, but you know we wanted to kind of do it justice and all the rest of it. You don’t want to kind of rush out some half-finished coat of paint kind of deal.

“So all of that kind of happened way past any time we could really action on it, so it’s good news in the sense that the uptake’s huge, bad in the sense that we weren’t able to leverage that and turn it around.”

If the Xbox One and PS4 had at least some kind of backwards compatibility, this wouldn’t even have been as much of an issue, but as it stands… well.

2014 FIFA World Cup will hit the Xbox 360 and PS3 June 17.