As the cost of making video games continues to rise, it becomes harder and harder to compete against the industry giants. Take for example, the apparent stranglehold that the EA Sports brand has enjoyed this generation in virtually every category of sports game on the market. While other companies may make games that receive just as much, if not more, critical acclaim from the press as EA’s franchises do, they still get outsold because they can’t compete with EA’s development and marketing resources and brand recognition.
Case in point, the NHL 2K series from Take Two and 2K Sports. While EA’s NHL series has always been consistently fun to play, most critics have agreed that NHL 2K has been a truer simulation of the game. However, this past Thursday Take Two released their Q4 financial report, where the company traditionally unveils their tentative line-up of titles for the next year, and it appears that NHL 2K10 may have been the final entry in the franchise. NHL 2K11 is notably absent from the report, while both the 2011 entries in 2K Sports’ NBA and MLB franchises are listed.
Fans of the now defunct College Hoops 2K franchise faced this same situation a few years ago when the 2009 iteration of that series failed to appear in the Q4 2008 financial report. Take Two would officially announce the cancellation of that series a month later.
When asked to comment on the series’ future, 2K Sports’ Bryan Lam gave this, not exactly encouraging, statement:
“We are currently in the process of evaluating our sports portfolio and have not announced any new NHL titles at this time,”
Hopefully this will turn out to be a false alarm as 2K has always made an excellent hockey game and EA Sports’ own games, while usually great, have typically been even better when they have a strong competitor to encourage innovation.
[Via: PastaPadre]
Sad news, but in EA’s defense, their NHL series has actually been much, much better compared to the 2K series in the past few years. In fact, 2K has mostly been playing catch up with EA year after year, with innovations such as the right stick being used to shoot and deke, online leagues, and more.
Really though, I’d be interested to know how NHL 2K10 has performed, especially on the Wii. Watching games on TV, there are still advertisements for the 2K10 game, specifically for the Wii, so the marketing push is certainly there despite the game not being quite as good as the EA counterpart.
Yeah, I haven’t played either of the 2010 versions very much but the general feeling seems to be that EA really pulled ahead of 2K this year. For the record I’ve usually preferred 2K in the past, but haven’t actually bought a hockey title since 2K6.
Still, if this turns out to be true, I don’t know if EA will really feel that NHL is a big enough franchise to continue trying to innovate in. Madden continues to be a great football game without any competition but in some ways they still haven’t caught up to some of the stuff 2K was doing in NFL 2K5. I can’t help but feel that EA Sports doesn’t really go all out unless they have a strong competitor to drive them.