Electronic Arts is developing an American football experience unlike anything it’s made before, the company said in a memo shared publicly after closing BioWare and laying off 400 people across the company. In trying to spin the news positively and toward the future, the memo’s attributed writers, chief studios officer Cam Weber and chief operating officer David Tinson, spoke about several of the publishing giant’s upcoming games, including something EA is calling Project Gridiron.
What is Project Gridiron? The memo’s exact phrasing calls it a “social-first open-world experience for our American Football team.” In other words, EA is getting closer to something I’ve been writing about for years: Madden (and possibly College Football) heavily cribbing from NBA 2K’s The City mode and giving football fans a virtual social space of their own.
The memo speaks of Project Gridiron as a glimmering future prospect, ignoring–or perhaps unaware of–the fact that such a mode requires EA to be a totally different company than it has proven to be. A mode like The City demands three things the EA Sports brand has historically lacked: patience, an authentic voice, and community goodwill.
In NBA 2K, The City is a social hub that players can jump into with friends and strangers. In this open-world setting, players play pick-up streetball games and limited-time modes, enter tournaments for prizes, work out, practice, or simply cross the virtual hangout space to get to their next NBA game in their custom avatar’s solo career.
Importantly, it’s also dominated by spending opportunities, including in-game shops that sell sneakers from brands such as Nike and Adidas, streetwear from labels like Fried Rice and Washed Dads, fantasy items like magician and dragon costumes, as well as branded watches, arm sleeves, sunglasses, scooters, and much more. As rich as it is with things to do, it’s also packed with ways to spend money.
In essence, the mode blends live-service gameplay with in-game stores that players actually walk into and browse. It might sound corny or overtly cash-grabby to the uninitiated–and to some ever-present degree, it is–but it’s grown into the star at the center of the series’ solar system. It offers tons to do; there’s always something new and interesting going on. Though I get annoyed when my avatar has to work out in the invasively green-and-orange Gatorade Gym, or when Jake from State Farm approaches me in a cutscene to give me new quests, on balance, it’s a mode that’s well worth its time.
The City makes a tremendous amount of money for NBA 2K, and not just from in-game microtransactions. It’s become such a must-play mode for so many basketball fans and friend groups that it’s helped NBA 2K outsell EA’s football games, despite this country’s unique obsession with football.
That’s because the team behind NBA 2K, Visual Concepts, has spent the last decade and beyond building this mode up into something that could attract so many players. What is today, arguably, the game’s main attraction actually has roots in NBA 2K14’s mode called MyPark, a smaller, more modest hangout space that later grew into The Neighborhood and, eventually, The City.
As mentioned, I’ve been waiting for EA to crib from this mode, so it wasn’t surprising to see the company tease it. In fact, such a mode called The Grounds already debuted in EA’s soccer game, EA Sports FC, just last month. The FC team is usually first out of the gate with shiny new tech or transferable features like this, so it makes sense that the brand’s American football games will follow. That’s the company’s pecking order.
But EA Sports games rarely show the kind of patience the NBA 2K series is known for. Traditionally, Madden has lacked a long view. I’ve heard the team speak in terms like “three-year plan” for the series, so I understand the studio plots what’s next in the near future, but nothing Madden has ever done feels like it’s built on a longer time scale than that. Too often in Madden’s history, a new feature would debut; maybe it would be good, or even not so good, but there would be obvious room for improvement, and then players would watch that part of the game stagnate over the next several years.
Even as the most recent entries in the Madden series have shown more interest in building on each successive game–a trait I credit to the braintrust that returned to the company when EA’s College Football series was revived–some things still seem stuck in quicksand. Players eagerly waited an extra two months after the launch of Madden 22 for a draft-scouting overhaul, but when it finally arrived, it was lackluster, and five years later, the same system is in use.
Often, EA’s way of abandoning features leaves the better ones stuck in neutral, feeding the age-old criticism that sports games fail to innovate year over year, while the more poorly received features sometimes get totally removed after a couple of years. Visual Concepts sees a mixed response as constructive criticism. EA’s two-headed football team at Tiburon too often sees a mixed response as good reason to drop an idea completely. In most cases, one of these is the right way to handle it, and the other is EA’s way.
When other game companies mess with players’ money, players notice. When EA messes with players’ money, players mobilize.
But a social hub mode like The City demands patience. The earliest versions probably won’t be great, and they might even be bad if FC’s The Grounds and WWE 2K’s The Island are any indication. In each case, developers tried to apply what The City does so well to their respective sports sims, but both games’ communities reacted negatively, citing a lack of meaningful things to do. They’ve become painfully obvious signals that these modes were built and imagined first as cash registers rather than captivating modes. As overt as NBA 2K’s shopping mall aesthetic can be, there’s a lot to love outside the shops. Will EA commit to sticking with Project Gridiron when the initial response is likely to be tepid or worse? History suggests not.
Maybe NBA 2K uniquely benefited from being the only sports series to try something like this over a decade ago, so Visual Concepts could build it up over time without any comparisons for players to make. That leaves EA’s efforts to be judged in the uncomfortable shadow of The City’s tremendous appeal. But it’s also been nearly 15 years since NBA 2K first signaled that it was headed toward a social-first ecosystem. Where else in AAA game development does a great idea take a decade or more to be copied? EA was slow to compete.
To my eyes, the company didn’t want to invest in something on that scale, and it paid for it. Instead, seven years after the earliest drafts of what would become The City, EA tried to extract similar value from a smaller-scope social mode. It introduced The Yard in Madden 21, a social “street” football mode with no shared social space, few events or attractions, and only shop menus to browse. That mode has since morphed into Superstar Showdown, so it does still exist, but the changes are largely cosmetic–swapping The Yard’s grassy outdoor field for a confusing laser-tag look. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who cites it as the reason they buy the game.
That neon-lit field is emblematic of another issue: EA’s cosmetics feel disingenuous, with most paid offerings placed on an uninspiring spectrum from “how do you do, fellow kids?” to garish.
Some players refuse to spend an extra dime in any game. I’m not such a person. I’ll buy skins in Fortnite, outfits in Arc Raiders, and clothes in NBA 2K if I feel like it. But I’ve never seen anything I wanted to spend money on in Madden. Literally. Not once in a series I play 500 hours a year.
That’s not like me, and it’s easy to see why. You couldn’t pay me to wear them, never mind ask me to fork over my real-life money for such gaudy options. Unlike NBA 2K’s cosmetics, which feature some admittedly absurd stuff alongside styles rooted in authentic basketball culture, in Madden, everything carries the aesthetic of a mall kiosk selling meme tees to adolescent boys.
How can EA sustain an ecosystem like The City if its players aren’t buying lots of cosmetics? While The City offers dozens of brands at once, FC’s The Grounds debuted with just a handful. Over time, the quantity of cosmetic options needs to increase significantly, but so does their quality. And if the mode itself is no good, even that won’t be enough, because no one will be there to buy those cosmetics anyway.
That brings me to the third self-inflicted wound EA will suffer as it builds Project Gridiron: an earned lack of community goodwill. One aspect of The City I’ve criticized a lot over the years is how it handles gameplay-altering microtransactions. It’s not just clothing and mascot costumes you can buy in The City. The series’ Virtual Currency can be spent to improve your player. In the NBA 2K community, it’s essentially a baked-in tax that all dedicated players pay up front.
You have two options: Buy a bundle of VC once you get into The City, immediately propelling your avatar from a player rated 60 to something closer to 80, or you can buy one of the game’s more expensive editions, which include a bunch of VC as a bonus.
Either way, for new players in the game’s community, it can feel like reading the line items on your phone bill and finding a hidden charge you didn’t know you were responsible for. We can’t see the exact numbers, but there’s no doubt this tactic is a massive money-maker for Visual Concepts and parent company Take-Two Interactive. Walking around The City during the game’s launch week every September, it’s hard to find players who haven’t already paid their way past the initial skill grind.
I’ve previously explained how much this part of the game sucks, despite how much fun the better parts are, and I’m far from the only one who feels that way. Still, the community seems to have accepted this reality. People like me make articles, videos, and memes about the “2K tax,” but most of us still pay it year after year because the alternative is being the only low-rated player in your crew and getting left on the figurative bench. Players don’t like the hidden fee, but it’s been there for so long that most just pay it and move on.
EA won’t get that same mild response. It’s EA. Players love to hate EA, and sometimes EA has given players good reason to feel that way. When EA tries a new money-making scheme, players notice and revolt loudly. Just look to this past summer, when College Football 27 was pissing everyone off due to slower XP gains that the publisher paired with new microtransactions that circumvented those slowdowns. Players protested, and within days, EA removed those paid options, though it said they’ll be back. (Good luck to the EA Sports comms team with that one next summer.)
Go back a few years and see how a similar rejection of pay-to-win elements in EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 led DICE to basically rewrite the game’s economy in just a few weeks, helping usher in the now-ubiquitous cosmetic-only battle-pass system. When other game companies mess with players’ money, players notice. When EA messes with players’ money, players mobilize.
EA will certainly bring the same pay-to-win scheme we’ve seen in NBA 2K to Project Gridiron. I’m sure because EA has already brought that scheme to FC’s The Grounds. It’s even in Superstar Showdown, though, almost comically, it’s made less noise there because no one cares about the mode anyway.
The company that gave us viral bad news like “Project $10,” day-one DLC, and paid crafting materials in Dead Space 3 simply hasn’t earned a tempered response from players, and so there won’t be one. Every financial scheme will be forensically investigated by content creators seeking to lay out the greedy math of it all for their audiences.
EA wants to bounce back from the dramatic closure of BioWare and the elimination of 400 roles by pointing to the future. “Today’s news is grim, but look at what we have cooking for you,” the company hopes to imply. But in chasing NBA 2K’s The City, Project Gridiron will need its developer-publisher to be patient, authentic, and generous–everything it’s never been.
