Digital Arts revealed earlier this yr 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 received 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 recreation by making an attempt to barter model partnerships with particular person schools like UCLA.
“UCLA Athletics and UCLA Logos & 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 Ladies’s Basketball packages carry the wealthy legacy of Bruins basketball to a future venture,” the college introduced on Thursday.
Deliver 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 outwardly very sad about this. In response to Sports activities Enterprise Journal, it wished the rights to every thing in NCAA divisional basketball on each males’s and ladies’s leagues, which might give it the form of exclusivity stranglehold it lengthy had with the NFL in its Madden sequence. And if EA doesn’t get its manner, 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 every thing 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 recreation that features all 350-plus NCAA Division I faculties—each males’s and ladies’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, should 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 will possibly get the NCAA and its member faculties to drag the plug on 2K’s recreation, it’ll be coming in late. A giant a part of what helped EA Sports activities Faculty Soccer explode in recognition final yr 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.
