THREE DOWNS, BUT NO LICENCE
Video game lets you play football the Canadian way
Fans of the Canadian Football League finally have the video game they’ve always wanted. Kind of.
Oh, it’s all there, from three downs and 110 yards to the waggle and, yes, even the ability to pull off a kick-it-in-kick-it-out of the end zone should the scenario arise. There are nine teams from nine Canadian cities, with players represented by three-dimensional graphics created through motioncapture technology.
What more could joystick jockeys looking to get their fix of the Canadian gridiron game want? Well, besides the actual teams and players, that is.
Canadian Football 2017 dropped digitally this week on Xbox One and Steam, putting the three-down circuit into the hands of fans on a major console for the first time.
For indie publisher David Winter, president of Canuck Play, based out of Peterborough, Ont., it’s his first time releasing a Canadian football game since CFL Football ’99 for PC.
“Consoles, up until very recently, were extraordinarily expensive to create games for,” Winter said. “You needed a big publisher. You had to be spending millions of dollars. It was really outside the realm of possibility to do a console title.
“But Canuck Play solved that by getting a publishing deal with Microsoft, so that put us on the Xbox One. Here we are now, publishing the very first Canadian football game on a major console, and we’re also launching a PC desktop port of that game.”
The move couldn’t come soon enough, as attendance is down in many markets as it becomes more and more difficult to capture the attention of younger audiences with the world at their fingertips.
“I’m a firm believer that one of the reasons that the National Football League has become so popular is because kids can jump onto Madden at any point in time to run around as Tom Brady and be Tom Brady,” Winter said.
“So if you’re trying to grow your brand and you’re trying to grow the sport in general, not everybody has the physical gifts to actually be out on the field playing,” said Winter, who played football growing up and whose sister was a cheerleader for the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the 1980s.
“For me, personally, this is how I stay involved in the sport. I’m 5-8, 150, and my zero-to-60 is about three days.”
The CFL isn’t behind the project, so instead of the Edmonton Eskimos, Canadian Football 2017 features a team in green and gold called the Edmonton Rhinos.
“Canadian Football ’17 is not licensed. There’s no league licence. There’s no players’ association licence. The players’ association never even returned our call,” said Winter, who approached the CFL with a budget of $500,000 in private funding, matched by an equal amount of government grants and tax incentives. “Our development budget with a licence was about a million dollars.”
The CFL did not respond to interview requests on the topic of video games.
Winter said he was told the league was looking for a developer who would pay for both development and marketing, as well as a royalty to the CFL on top.
“The math doesn’t work,” he said. “They’re asking a developer to spend more money on the game than they could ever possibly recoup. They’re looking for somebody to just gift them a game. They don’t want to invest anything into it.”
While there is no built-in player or team editor on the Xbox version, anyone with a little know-how can open the various files on PC in Notepad and change all the logos, uniforms and player and team names, if they want to do so.
“I don’t want to hear about it, but you can do what you want to do,” Winter said. “The console is a little more restrictive. For 2018, we’re going to try and address those things.”
They’ll also address online play, which isn’t available in this inaugural edition of the game, said Winter, who spent five years as an online producer for EA Sports.
(The CFL is) looking for somebody to just gift them a game. They don’t want to invest anything into it.