Allowing NCAA athletes to sell their names, images, and likeness in the new EA Sports football game could drive purchase value per MAU
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Research Category: TAM and Industry Trends for virtualgoods.shop
For now, EA Sports is planning to move forward without rosters that include the names, images or likenesses of real college players. Current NCAA rules prohibit athletes from selling their NIL rights while in college. However, those rules are likely to be changed at some point in the coming year -- by the NCAA, state legislatures or Congress. It's not yet clear whether the evolving rules will allow for the kind of group licensing arrangements that would be needed for EA Sports to negotiate with athletes to use their names in the game. Holt said that EA Sports will monitor the NIL discussion if and when things change but that it's too early for that to happen. He also said what happens in NIL legislation will not change whether the game happens or when it will end up on shelves.
Allowing athletes to profit on their names, images, and likeness would cut into EA Sports profit on the video game. As a result, EA Sports might encourage more virtual goods development and sales on their platform to compensate for this loss. Increased customization choices in the game also lends itself to virtual goods content creation. These complementary influences could drive the annual purchase value per MAU for virtual goods shop.
EA had about 90M sports game players in early 2018 so probably had over 100M by last year
View above about Model Issue: Current annual virtual goods purchase value per MAU
The company said that its EA Sports games now has nearly 90 million players across the titles on current gen consoles with nearly 18 million players playing in competitive gaming across “FIFA 18” and “Madden NFL 18.” That’s up more than 75% year-over-year.
Recently, EA had sports games virtual goods annual revenue of about $1.5B from about 100M sports games players, for $15 on average annually
View above about Model Issue: Current annual virtual goods purchase value per MAU
EA made $1.49 billion in in the past year just on digital goods within its multiplayer sports game modes.
