EA Sports MMA

» see ea.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

EA Sports MMA shipped on 19 October 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, built by EA Tiburon, with Randy Couture and Fedor Emelianenko sharing the cover. It was a serious attempt at the sport. The striking read better than its competition and the submission system asked more of you. The roster came out of Strikeforce and Japan's DREAM, because the promotion that mattered most had already refused to be in it.

That refusal is the whole story. The UFC had sold its game license to THQ and treated any rival product as an attack. Dana White told fighters directly that if they did business with EA they would not be in the UFC. Randy Couture appeared anyway, in the middle of his own contract fight with the promotion. White eventually walked the threat back, but by then the message had done its work on everybody who had not yet signed.

I was twenty six in 2010, working as an engineer in Ankara, and none of this was my sport or my machine. Mixed martial arts had almost no broadcast presence in Turkey then, and console sports games were never where my money went. This one I know from the record rather than the controller.

The game reviewed at 79 on Metacritic and sold badly enough that an analyst at Cowen described it as more or less dead on arrival at retail. On 13 April 2012 EA switched off the online servers for both consoles, which also killed the Online Pass that buyers of used copies had paid extra to activate. Eighteen months after release the multiplayer half of the product no longer existed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fight before the release ~

Exclusivity in sports games was not new. EA had spent the previous decade locking up the NFL, and the UFC was applying the same logic back at it with a smaller roster and a much louder president. What made the MMA case unusual is that the leverage ran through individual athletes rather than through a league office. A fighter is a contractor. Telling contractors that appearing in a video game would end their careers is a cheaper way to starve a competitor than outbidding it.

There was a theory going around in late 2009 that EA was letting the game founder deliberately so it could buy the UFC license later at a better price. That reading was too clever. What actually happened is that EA lost and then waited, buying the license off a collapsing THQ in 2012 and shipping EA Sports UFC in June 2014 with the exact branding it had been denied.

~ banned in Denmark ~

The strangest thing in the whole file is that Danish players never got the game at all. The cage in EA Sports MMA carried energy drink advertising reproduced from real events, and Danish law at the time restricted that kind of advertising. Rather than build a separate Danish build, EA pulled the release. An entire country missed a fighting game over the branding painted on the canvas.

~ 13 April 2012 ~

Server shutdowns are the quiet way sports games die, and EA runs them in batches. MMA went out in a group of retirements announced in early 2012, alongside a stack of older titles nobody was defending. The single-player game still runs today on the original hardware, which makes this a partial death rather than a total one, but the part that made it a fighting game against other people ended on a Friday in April.

Two years later EA had the UFC license and no reason to look back. EA Sports MMA is the only game in that lineage with a Strikeforce belt in it, and it will stay that way.

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