Electronic Arts' most famous
brand name, with which they label their various sports
franchises. These include:
John Madden Football
FIFA Football (or FIFA Soccer)
NASCAR Thunder
NHL Hockey
MLB Baseball
NBA Live
Rugby
Cricket
Tiger Woods Golf
NB: Many of the games are simply known by their sport, and carry no other distinctive title.
EA Sports has the slogan If it's in the game, it's in the Game, stating their apparent desire to provide the most complete, realistic depiction of the sport in question possible. All the games feature all the real life players, teams, sponsors, stadia, and more. Further, they use famous commentators and now, mainstream music artists to further enhance the experience.
However, many would argue this is at the expense of the gameplay itself. While the presentation is nothing short of flawless, polished to a blinding sheen, the games themselves are often without soul, excitement or spirit. EA is already notorious for its shameless cookie-cutter games, and EA Sports is most responsible for this.
Every year, each franchise is updated with new players, and a new feature or two, but the fact stands that on the whole, FIFA 99, for example, is more or less equal to FIFA 2003. Further, in FIFA's case the games are often released more than once in a year (as in 1998, when Road to World Cup 98 was released mere months before the virtually identical World Cup 98 game). Other times the game engine is simply re-engineered to accomodate different leagues and released again as a full price product.
The tragedy is that the games sell massively regardless of their quality, thanks to the reputation they earned in the early days (when NHL '94 and its brethren were the definitive sports games on most platforms, and thanks to the fact that they are literally the McDonalds of sports games - they're such a strong, well-known brand that everyone buys it anyway.
Contenders like Konami's ISS Pro and Fox Sports NHL have made some inroads into addressing this dominance, but with mostly limited success.
Pseudo Intellectual has pointed out that many of EA Sports' games come from an office in Burnaby, British Columbia. Quite a large number of EA's games come from Canada, notably the Need For Speed series, and marvellous snowmobile game Sled Storm. This is also a point of contention for gamers, as PC Gamer UK admonished that sketches were needed to show the Canadian developers 'what the game of football is' when they were working on FIFA.