Digital Arts revealed earlier this 12 months that it’s planning so as to add a university basketball recreation to its ever-expanding roster of sports activities franchises. Then 2K Video games got here out hours later and indicated it was doing the identical. Now new reporting suggests each publishers have been at warfare behind the scenes making an attempt to lock up the offers wanted to make an NCAA basketball recreation a actuality.
Sports activities Enterprise Journal stories that whereas EA gained a bidding spherical earlier this 12 months with the Collegiate Licensing Firm for the rights to the NCAA model, 2K Video games has moved ahead with its personal faculty basketball recreation by making an attempt to barter model partnerships with particular person faculties 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 can see the UCLA Males’s and Girls’s Basketball packages convey the wealthy legacy of Bruins basketball to a future venture,” the college introduced 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 😏
— NBA 2K (@NBA2K) June 30, 2025
EA is outwardly very sad about this. In response to Sports activities Enterprise Journal, it needed the rights to the whole lot in NCAA divisional basketball on each males’s and girls’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 method, sources instructed Sports activities Enterprise Journal the writer may abandon the upcoming recreation altogether.
“The chance that’s excited us in faculty basketball is to ship a full, standalone expertise that captures the whole lot that makes the game so particular,” EA Sports activities VP Sean O’Brien instructed SBJ in a press release. “The strategy we’ve proposed is to create a recreation that features all 350-plus NCAA Division I faculties—each males’s and girls’s groups included—with title, picture and likeness compensation for all athletes, 32 conferences, the NCAA and all issues that make ‘March Insanity’ essentially the most thrilling month of sports activities and all of the traditions and pageantry followers love.”
Mainly, 2K Video games, which was reportedly a part of the NCAA bidding warfare however misplaced to EA, has determined to maneuver forward with a university basketball recreation 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 stories, probably place it as an add-on or enlargement for the present franchise.
EA, which additionally deserted its basketball franchise over a decade in the past, must begin from scratch. Latest reporting suggests a brand new recreation can be years away at finest and probably not arrive till 2028 or later. Except it could get the NCAA and its member faculties to tug the plug on 2K’s recreation, it’ll be coming in late. An enormous a part of what helped EA Sports activities Faculty Soccer explode in recognition final 12 months was years of pent-up demand. Now each publishers are in a race to see who can money in on the newest untapped marketplace for annual sports activities video games.
