EA and the NFL announced on Friday a partnership with ESPN and Disney XD to broadcast the two-part EA Sports Madden NFL 18 Championship Series.
The first part is the Madden NFL Club Championship, which begins with the Pro Bowl today and culminates in the final at the Super Bowl Experience in Minneapolis on Feb. 1. Part two will kick off the day after with the Madden NFL Ultimate League that runs for 2 1/2 months until it finishes at the NFL Draft on April 28.
This is ESPN’s first long-term, multi-event competitive gaming agreement, as Digital Media Programming VP John Lasker said in a statement that the deal is for multiple years.
ESPN has broadcast esports events in the past but they have been one-off showings like the Heroes of Dorm events in 2015/2016 and Rocket League at the X Games in the summer of 2017. With 30 hours of scheduled programming across ESPN2, ESPNEWS and ESPN Deportes, the partnership with Madden will be ESPN’s largest undertaking in the esports world to date.
“We asked ourselves, what games does EA make that will resonate with people?” said Todd Sitrin, EA’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Competitive Gaming Division. “The first games we thought of were FIFA and Madden. Our previous activations have been small, this is a much larger investment and we are making more content.”
Esports fans may remember ESPN’s forays into competitive Madden in the past. Madden Nation ran for four seasons from 2005 until 2008 and featured the best Madden players in the world alongside NFL counterparts. The show was cancelled in 2009, but Sitrin and the rest of EA took some lessons from past experiences in this space.
“One of the things we learned is how to get our content out there, how to diversify the audience,” Sitrin said. “The ESPN audience is your mainstream sports fans while Disney XD is your younger entertainment audience, so they are very complementary.”
The events won’t only be broadcasted on the ESPN and Disney platforms. In fact, they will be broadcast just about everywhere imaginable.
“We will be broadcasting on Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Mixer and YouTube,” Sitrin said. “Our goal was to be accessible. We want to allow viewers to choose how they want to watch. We don’t want to cut off a channel just because we want to bring it to a different audience.”
The primary broadcast method of the endemic esports industry is Twitch.tv and has been for a long time. While Sitrin wants to be careful not to alienate the core group of gamers that make up the esports industry, the goal of EA and ESPN is to bring esports into the mainstream.
“We want to open up the esports industry to places it hasn’t gone before,” Sitrin said. “Esports up until this point has been hardcore gaming experiences and watched by people who play the games. My definition of the mainstream is that you don’t have to play the game to want to watch it. How many people watching the Super Bowl actually played tackle football?”
Just about everyone understands the basic concept of football, even if they didn’t play the game. That is not true for esports like League of Legends or DOTA with massive pools of available champions and variety in team compositions.
Yet, if a lack of accessibility was the thing holding esports down, sports games would have been dominating the esports industry for a long time, but that’s not the case.
Sports games like Madden NFL, FIFA and NBA 2K come with their own unique drawbacks. First is the yearly entry fee. Every other esport is a one-time purchase and many, like the two listed above, are free to download and play. By forcing the consumer to pay $60 to play the latest iteration, the quality of competition can suffer from year to year.
Another issue is the focus on artificial intelligence. Esports are usually team games. (Fighting games like Super Smash Bros. and card games like Hearthstone are the exception.) One person controls one character, and the focus is on team play. The Madden Championship Series will be one-on-one competition. This means 10 other players on the field are AI-controlled. That adds unpredictability and random number generation (RNG) to the game. The NBA 2K League has circumvented this issue by having its games be five-on-five.
By partnering with the NFL and coordinating the events with the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft, EA is tapping into a massive audience of sports fans. Still, just because they understand the game, does not mean that football fans will feel the same way about Madden players as they do the players on the field.
“We are excited to partner with EA SPORTS and ESPN to bring the Madden Club Championship and Madden Ultimate League to the millions of Madden NFL fans globally and to broadcast these competitions from our key fan events, like the Super Bowl and the Draft,” Chris Halpin, Chief Strategy Officer of the NFL, said in a statement. “We are also thrilled to be the first major professional sports league to have every team represented in a premier esports event. We are confident our fans will love the competition and action.”