The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
EA Sports will block manual add of certain players
Gamers will be blocked from manually adding players to EA Sports’ new college football game who decide not to accept an offer to have their name, image and likeness used in it, the video-game developer said.
EA Sports revealed the safeguard in its announcement that it has begun reaching out to athletes to pay them to be featured in the video game that’s set to launch this summer.
EA Sports said players who opt in to the game will receive a minimum of $600 and a copy of “EA Sports College Football 25.” There will also be opportunities for them to earn money by promoting the game. Players who opt out will be left off the game entirely.
EA Sports didn’t say in an email to The Associated Press how it plans to prevent people playing the game from adding — or creating — the opt-outs. But gamers will still be able to create their own players, a staple of past college sports video games that allowed people to depict themselves alongside their favorite athletes.
The developers’ yearly college football games stopped being made in 2013 amid lawsuits over using players’ likeness without compensation. The games featured players that might not have had reallife names, but resembled that season’s stars in almost every other way.
That major hurdle was alleviated with the approval of NIL deals for college athletes. EA Sports has been working on its new game since at least 2021, when it announced it would pay players to be featured in it.
Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association, said his focus for years has been on getting athletes opportunities like this. From that standpoint, he sees the opt-in offer as a major milestone.
“Players like being in the game,” Huma said. “There was a question of, ‘Hey, should we be paid for this?’ ... We’re going to see pretty soon here the degree to which players think it’s fair or not.”
Huma’s association was involved in what could be considered the precursor lawsuit to a litany of NIL litigation — a 2009 class-action suit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon.
“I remember what the origin of this fight was,” Huma said. “And that was O’Bannon questioning why he was in EA Sports and not getting money for it.”
A generic player created “based on the traditional strength or weakness of a position over the past decade for that school” will be used in place of players who opt out, Daryl Holt, EA Sports senior vice president, told ESPN. On the topic of blocking opt-out players from being added, Holt told the network, “I won’t reveal how we’re dealing with that.”
“But yeah, you won’t be able to edit that,” Holt told ESPN.