CBS: SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 won't license trademarks to EA Sports

[BleedGopher]

per CBS:

The SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 have each elected not to reach a licensing agreement with EA Sports, meaning the conferences will not be mentioned by name -- or have its logo included -- in future editions of the company's popular college football video game.

If Mike Slive, Jim Delany and Larry Scott have decided its best for their conferences to exit the video game business, however, there seems a real possibility that the schools that employ them might be considering following suit. There's not much to do for fans of the series to do but sit, wait, and hope everything remains quiet along this front until "College Football 2015" is released next summer.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefoo...nd-pac12-wont-license-trademarks-to-ea-sports

Go Gophers!!

 

[highwayman]

There is nothing stopping EA from using generic names for the conferences and teams. Think of Southern States Conference, Mid North America Conference, and West Ocean Conference, populated by Red Wave University, Gopher State U, and the University of Golden State. Heck, the could almost get away with names like Minnesota University, Spartan University, and Northwestern Chicago State U. Even the colors are not sacrosanct if the uniforms look different.

EA will find a way and millions will buy the game.

 

[RodentRampage]

If the conferences and schools don't want to license their trademarks to EA, EA will be able to work around it. Instead of the Big Ten Conference, you could have the Large Decimal Conference. The teams could be generic as well.

Now, people aren't going to want to play generic teams in generic stadiums to win generic conference titles. What EA can do is to allow people to change the names and images. Older versions used to allow you to create a stadium, they could bring back this feature. You can already download rosters, EA could allow third-party updates that change the names of the conferences, team names, images used for the teams and the stadiums.

The conferences and schools would have washed their hands of it, and EA wouldn't be supplying the trademarked data, only allowing users to alter data.