Digital Arts revealed earlier this yr that it’s planning to add a college basketball game to its ever-expanding roster of sports activities franchises. Then 2K Video games got here out hours later and indicated it was doing the same. Now new reporting suggests each publishers have been at warfare behind the scenes attempting to lock up the offers wanted to make an NCAA basketball sport a actuality.
Sports Business Journal reports that whereas EA gained a bidding spherical earlier this yr with the Collegiate Licensing Firm for the rights to the NCAA model, 2K Video games has moved ahead with its personal faculty basketball sport by attempting to barter model partnerships with particular person schools like UCLA.
“UCLA Athletics and UCLA Emblems & Licensing, an enterprise of the Related College students UCLA, have introduced a long-term collaboration with 2K which is able to see the UCLA Males’s and Girls’s Basketball packages carry the wealthy legacy of Bruins basketball to a future challenge,” the college announced on Thursday.
Carry the Insanity. Let’s run it again. #CBB #ItsInTheGame pic.twitter.com/iBNhGxn2yj
— EA SPORTS (@EASPORTS) June 30, 2025
The campus has been quiet for too lengthy 😏 https://t.co/AuqoX5u5Qr
— NBA 2K (@NBA2K) June 30, 2025
EA is seemingly very sad about this. In keeping with Sports activities Enterprise Journal, it needed the rights to all the pieces in NCAA divisional basketball on each males’s and ladies’s leagues, which might give it the type of exclusivity stranglehold it lengthy had with the NFL in its Madden collection. And if EA doesn’t get its manner, sources instructed Sports activities Enterprise Journal the writer may abandon the upcoming sport altogether.
“The chance that’s excited us in faculty basketball is to ship a full, standalone expertise that captures all the pieces that makes the game so particular,” EA Sports activities VP Sean O’Brien instructed SBJ in an announcement. “The strategy we’ve proposed is to create a sport that features all 350-plus NCAA Division I faculties—each males’s and ladies’s groups included—with identify, picture and likeness compensation for all athletes, 32 conferences, the NCAA and all issues that make ‘March Insanity’ probably the most thrilling month of sports activities and all of the traditions and pageantry followers love.”
Principally, 2K Video games, which was reportedly a part of the NCAA bidding warfare however misplaced to EA, has determined to maneuver forward with a school basketball sport regardless. Whereas it deserted its Hoops franchise over a decade in the past, it’s been releasing NBA2K yearly and will shortly spin off a brand new model of it for school groups or, as SBJ experiences, presumably place it as an add-on or growth for the present franchise.
EA, which additionally deserted its basketball franchise over a decade in the past, must begin from scratch. Recent reporting suggests a brand new sport can be years away at greatest and presumably not arrive until 2028 or later. Except it will probably get the NCAA and its member faculties to drag the plug on 2K’s sport, it’ll be coming in late. A giant a part of what helped EA Sports activities Faculty Soccer explode in reputation final yr was years of pent-up demand. Now each publishers are in a race to see who can money in on the most recent untapped marketplace for annual sports activities video games.
