December 13, 2004 is a day that football games changed forever as Electronic Arts and the NFL entered an exclusive agreement with each other to make the Madden NFL series the only game in town. While there’s always been a vocal outcry from the community, today things definitely took an interesting turn as a select few of the aforementioned filed a lawsuit against EA.
The suit, filed by gamers across the country from California to Washington D.C., claims that after cutting the price of Madden NFL 2005 from $49.95 to $29.95, the following year’s version, Madden NFL 2006, raised the price of the game to 70 percent.
They also call EA’s exclusivity deal “blatantly anticompetitve conduct,” in regards to the NFL deal as well as the company’s other deals with the Arena Football League and NCAA Football. All of the plaintiffs seek restitution and and damages for each of them who have purchased the game since 2005.
My personal thoughts on the lawsuit are at the jump.
Geeks to Madden: Jock Block This! - [TMZ.com]
The sheer stupidity of this lawsuit aside, there are a number of things about this that just stink to me. First of all, being a Madden NFL fan for as long as I remember, there’s never been an edition of this game in the last two decades of its existence that hasn’t sold at full MSRP upon initial release. The only time Madden NFL 2005’s price dropped was around the time of the exclusivity announcement (which was also around the holidays), nearly six months after it came out, so whoever helped them file this should have done their homework.
Tags: all-pro football, class-action lawsuit, ea sports, football, john madden, madden nfl, sports games, take-two, who are the top 10 nfl quarterbacks
