EA Sports FC welcomes competition from rumored FIFA revival: ‘A deep football game takes many years’

The EA Sports FC dev team embraces potential competition in the football video game space as rumors fly about the FIFA brand’s revival at another developer.

In an interview with Eurogamer at the EA Sports FC 25 preview event last week, the game’s associate producer, Sam Rivera, discussed how they welcome competition from a potential new rival.

“We welcome competition and I think that’s good. It’s good for everyone. We want to see what other what other football games can do,” Rivera said. “But what I can tell you is [that to] create a fun, deep football game takes many years. For us, like literally every year, just on community feedback, we take in thousands of changes, little things here and there. We try so many different things and then we’re finally in a position where we know how we can fix these.”

EA Sports has been making football video games since 1993. Although they jettisoned the FIFA branding in 2022, the team has kept up with the annual release of football games under the new EA Sports FC moniker.

“If you compare [EA Sports FC] 24 and [FIFA] 14—10 years difference—there’s a lot of improvements, a lot of things that you can right away see,” Rivera continued. “The amount of bugs, amount of problems [it had], the game [now] is just a lot more polished. And that takes 10 years to get there. So basically it takes time, iteration, knowing what the community wants. Those things don’t happen just by themselves. You need to hear from them. They don’t get built by themselves. It’s an interesting process we go through every year.”

Rumor has it that 2K Games, the publisher behind the NBA 2K, PGA Tour 2K, and WWE 2K sports series, has reportedly secured the license for the next FIFA game.

With the decline of Konami’s eFootball (previously PES or Pro Evolution Soccer) series, the football video game space sorely needs new rival titles that can compete with EA Sports.

In case you missed it, UFL, the new football game with Christiano Ronaldo as its ambassador, is also shaping up to be a major player in the space.