Madden’s creator wins court ruling against EA

By Michael Rougeau June 24, 2013

For a company that legally locked down the exclusive rights to the NFL license for its Madden franchise, Electronic Arts seems to be spending an awful lot of time in court over its football properties. EA is currently embroiled in lawsuits involving the rights of using someone’s likeness in its NCAA games, a long-running suit against NFL Players, and now a jury has ruled that yet another lawsuit, this one from Madden’s creator, can go ahead.

The jury ruling states that the statute of limitations has not run out on the suit brought by Madden NFL creator Robin Antonick against EA, over alleged unpaid royalties from the franchise dating back to 1986. The ruling ends EA’s primary defense ever since the case was raised in 2011, concerning an agreement made decades ago. The jury ruled unanimously in Antonick’s favor and the suit will move forward, a press release sent out by his legal representatives said.

Antonick claims that he signed agreements with EA in 1986 that require the publisher to pay him royalties on all subsequent Madden games. The agreements also required EA to withhold certain “confidential information” that Antonick alleges they did in fact reveal. The suit covers every Madden game released between 1986 and 2013, but this phase of the case specifically covers the games up until 1996, before the series switched developers. Those games alone earned $200 million, of which the jury must now determine how much Antonick is owed. The games from 1997 on, which made significantly more money (the franchise is reportedly worth $5 billion), will be handled in a different phase.

“This is a major validation of Mr. Antonick’s testimony,” said Rob Carey, Antonick’s attorney, in the press release. “This was by far EA’s strongest defense, and the jury’s verdict unanimously supported Mr. Antonick, which also means the jury probably thinks some significant information was concealed.”

“Now the case goes to the merits, where we have irrefutable evidence,” he continued. “We are confident that we will be able to demonstrate that EA failed to live up to its agreement with Mr. Antonick and lied to him about the use of his protected work product in the games.”

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Michael Rougeau

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Mike Rougeau is a journalist and writer who lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and two dogs. He specializes in video…

Gaming

With EA’s help, Wild Hearts solves Monster Hunter’s biggest problem

Three players build to fight a monster in Wild Hearts.

Although Capcom’s Monster Hunter series is more popular than ever in the West, it’s still a daunting series to get into because of its overbearing tutorials and complicated UI. Koei Tecmo development team Omega Force didn’t want to repeat this mistake with Wild Hearts -- its upcoming fantasy monster-hunting game with a complex offensive crafting element. To solve this issue, it partnered with Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label to better understand how western players prefer to be treated in the earliest stages of a complicated adventure.
“We wanted to understand better how this game might be received by players in different parts of the world,” Co-Director Takuto Edagawa said when discussing the fruits of the EA partnership. “Players around the world don’t tend to like information being over-presented. They don’t want you to explain too much; they want to learn more in a hands-on way by experiencing it themselves through play.”
WILD HEARTS | 7 Minutes of Gameplay
Digital Trends put this to the test with our playable three-hour build of the earliest parts of Wild Hearts and found its introduction and tutorials to be better than anything Monster Hunter has done. Within 30 minutes, Wild Hearts players should be familiar with the basic concepts the game deals with and be set for what’s shaping up to be an enjoyable cooperative hunting and crafting adventure.
A wild hunt
“One thing that was very important to us was to not do a lot of explaining and then get into the story and gameplay,” Edagawa tells Digital Trends. “We wanted you to be able to play as soon as possible. We know that our players want to experience the game and world as soon as they can, so that was the fundamental approach we took with the opening.”
Wild Hearts begins peacefully, with a lone hunter walking through a forest rife with small friendly Kemono creatures. Soon, a small-time hunt begins as the player spots a deer-like Kemono. During this hunt, players will learn the basics of the camera and movement controls, the attacks at their disposal during combat, how to climb ledges with limited stamina, and how to sneak up on an enemy.
These are some basic fundamentals in hunting games, but the difference compared to Monster Hunter Rise is that the game isn’t constantly stopping the player with long cutscenes or large text boxes to explain basic things. Text boxes only appear if players choose to activate them when a tutorial pops up.
WILD HEARTS Official Reveal Trailer
The best game openings get right into things, which Wild Hearts successfully does. According to EA Originals Executive Producer Lewis Harvey, this is the aspect of the game Koei Tecmo wanted to work closely with EA on, although EA provided some character and world design input to the Japanese development team at Omega Force as well.
“EA has a great wealth of experience in its user research division, and we were able to provide a huge amount of testing and data to Koei Tecmo that really helped them fine-tune the game and make critical decisions around their feature set,” Harvey said. “A lot of the creative input and feedback we have given has been around tutorialization, onboarding, and clarity of features and UI to players.”
The hunt continues
The setup EA and Koei Tecmo settled on was already effective but wasn’t quite over yet. I soon came across a mystical being calling themselves Mujina. During a discussion with them, I established my character’s backstory, customized their look, learned more about the Kemono, and got my first significant objective: go to the nearby town of Minato.

Before I could do that, though, the environment around us quickly changed and was overtaken by ice. I used the skills the game had effectively taught me by that point to hunt down the source, a giant ice wolf Kemono, and I engaged them in battle. Unfortunately, this fight was impossible to win, so my character was defeated and tossed into a deep cave. That’s when Mujina reappeared and activated my Karakuri, a little device my hunter found in the last hunt and carried with them.
Then came the second part of the tutorial, which focused on this unique system. During development, Koei Tecmo decided to make crafting in Wild Hearts not just a defensive or preparation thing but something that can help during exploration and fights. To get out of this cave, I had to build up boxes of Karakuri to help me climb up a wall and then build more to create a vantage point I could aerially attack enemies from.
Karakuri building skills are critically important when preparing for hunting large Kemono, too. After escaping the cave, I used the Karakuri more traditionally to build a camp near a girl I found unconscious on the ground. Once I did that, another giant Kemono that looked like a giant rat with plants growing out of it attacked, and I set off on the first real hunt of the game, concluding the opening and kicking off the true Wild Hearts adventure.
While a lot more pleased me afterward -- like the colorful world design, attack damage numbers, and fact that Karakuri remains in the world map after a hunt to remind you of previous exploits -- this opening is what stuck with me.
Sayonara, Monster Hunter
I’ve tried to get into the mainline Monster Hunter series multiple times but always found the beginning of those games off-putting because of how daunting their openings and tutorials are. The king of this genre has an approachability problem, and Wild Hearts has a great chance of becoming the preferred option for new players thanks to how it handles player onboarding. Couple that with a cleaner UI, and this Wild Heats already has a better user experience -- even just 30 minutes into a preview build I played months ahead of its launch.

Gaming

EA Origin has been replaced with a new, faster PC app

The ea app homepage.

After the announcement in 2020 that the EA Origin marketplace would be shutting down, EA has released its next PC platform: the EA app.

Origin was EA's exclusive PC launcher for its titles first launched in 2011. It was intended to compete with other digital PC storefronts such as Steam, though it eventually integrated with its competitor to sell their titles on that service. Origin, however, was still required to run EA titles even if bought on Steam. Despite accumulating over 50 million registered users, the service was heavily criticized and maligned by the PC community due to security flaws and suspicions of spying on players. In late 2020, EA announced that it would retire Origin in favor of a new client simply called the EA app.

Gaming

FIFA 23 career mode guide: Lead your team to glory

fifa 23 career mode guide hero

FIFA 23 is one of the best sports games in the business, and one of its best features is the career mode. This lets you take charge of a club -- real or imaginary -- and take it to the top, buying players, unearthing future gems, and winning trophies along the way.

There’s a lot to learn in career mode, and whether you’re new to career mode or a seasoned veteran, there are always ways to improve. Read through our FIFA 23 career mode guide, though, and you’ll have the knowledge you need to take home the silverware.
Make a strong start