Currently, EA Sports has five major franchises under its belt: FIFA, Madden, NHL, F1, and UFC. But it used to cover a lot more sports in the past, including boxing with its Fight Night series of games. Fight Night fans have been left wanting for a decade, but a recent report claims that EA is working to revive the boxing series with a brand-new entry, currently codenamed Moneyball.
According to VGC’s sources, the new Fight Night game has already been greenlit and is in early development, supposedly at EA Vancouver. The studio has worked on the FIFA, NHL, and UFC series, and was also the developer of the last Fight Night game to be released, Fight Night Champion. Before fans get too excited, however, development on the game has temporarily paused in order to prioritize making the next EA Sports UFC game, presumably called UFC 5, since it’s scheduled to release next year.
In a studio-wide email sent to staff at EA Vancouver, and seen by VGC, the new Fight Night was meant to enter production alongside UFC 5. But, due to strong competition within the market, it became difficult to staff up for Fight Night. So, in order to ensure UFC 5 is of high quality, EA is focusing its efforts on that game for the time being and will return to Fight Night afterwards.
There are no real details on the new Fight Night, but it’s believed EA wishes to reassert itself in the fighting game market. When asked about the report, EA pointed out that it is company policy to not comment on rumors and speculation.
The last Fight Night game, Fight Night Champion, released in 2011 for consoles. Despite being a critical success for its gameplay, presentation, graphics, and single-player story mode, EA hasn’t released a new entry since, possibly due to the complications of licensing the likenesses of real-life boxers, as well as how much those likenesses cost. There has been some fan demand for the series to return, with even sports promoter Eddie Hearn claiming to have pitched a new Fight Night to EA.
This wouldn’t be the only dormant EA Sports franchise seeing a revival either. EA is planning to return to the world of golf with a new PGA Tour game that’s meant to be releasing in 2022. While the gap between releases hasn’t been as bad as Fight Night (the last golfing game from EA came out six years ago in 2015), its return is still something of a big deal, and may have been prompted by the success of 2K’s own golf gaming PGA Tour 2K21.
Source: VGC