Xbox pulled a game from the first-party store upon request from EA The developer says that the game was cancelled at their request
Microsoft has been reported to have had to cancel an event for sports on the Xbox original Xbox in the wake of EA requiring the game to be cancelled.
If you’re thinking about games for sports, the first name you’ll probably consider will be EA. Although the company is home to a variety of franchises such as The Sims, Mass Effect and more recently Star Wars, the most popular are sports games such as FIFA as well as Madden NFL.
EA’s dominance over games for sports has never been questioned, to the chagrin of its fans who have been not entirely satisfied with a number of new releases from the company that can be considered to be identical to the previous game or a lesser version.
It was reported that the company stretched its power at the beginning of the 2000s when it introduced the first Xbox in the early 2000s, as it caused a soccer match to be cancelled.
A former Xbox employee Garrett Young spoke about the game on the Kiwi Talkz podcast and shared his thoughts on the ways Xbox tried to prevent the errors of SEGA by making sure EA games made it to the platform’s new version.
SEGA sadly left console wars behind when it launched the SEGA Dreamcast and it failed despite having great games that came with it, such as Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Jet Set Radio.
Young claimed that there was a theory offered by Microsoft about the reasons SEGA failed to compete in the console game was that it had none of the support offered by EA for the Dreamcast which was a mistake that the company was trying to steer clear of at all costs.
It led to a contract to work with EA to incorporate a number of sports games into the new platform. But the deal was not able to work with a first-party soccer game Young had been working on that needed to be completely scrapped to ensure the terms of the deal were adhered to.
It could have been for the best as the assistance from EA is likely to have been a major element in bringing the new Xbox consoles out to the market which eventually led to it becoming the Sony and PlayStation competition that it currently is.
It’s possible that it would have been if SEGA could have been more aggressive in pushing EA games for the Dreamcast and it was in the current battle for consoles. It’s unlikely considering the high quality of Nintendo’s games however it’s something you should be thinking about.
