EA’s College Football 25 released to rave reviews and incredible interest this week. Its existence creates a path for a college hockey game in the future, but there are many legal issues to address.
EA’s College Football 25 released to rave reviews and incredible interest this week. Its existence creates a path for a college hockey game in the future, but there are many legal issues to address.
For sports video game fans who “never stopped believing,” this week has been the equivalent of Christmas and a 21st birthday all wrapped into one. The release of EA’s College Football 25, the first copy of the label’s hit college football franchise in a decade, has fans filled with a mix of relief and euphoria. The phenomenon has taken social media by storm.
For fans of other college sports, the game’s release has them asking “why not us?” Fans are clamoring for a revival of the hit NCAA Basketball series — the very game that caused the O’Bannon vs. NCAA case that ruled previous games violated athletes’ name, image and likeness right. And in some circles, fans are also pitching the addition of a college hockey game.
To be clear, there has been no indication that EA is interested in adding any titles, let alone making a brand new college hockey game. While it’d be cool to play as Red Wings pick Trey Augustine at Michigan State University, or maybe as Dylan Larkin on a University of Michigan legacy team, college hockey is still a rather niche audience for a sports entertainment company to invest resources in making a game.
The existence of College Football 25 provides a hypothetical framework for future college sports video games, but there’s a lot of complicated legal and financial considerations beneath the surface that won’t translate evenly to college hockey. Let's break it all down.
NIL Compensation
The decade-long absence of a college football video game might’ve been even longer had it not been for the Supreme Court case NCAA vs. Alston, decided in 2021. This case ruled that the NCAA’s limiting of athletes’ non-monetary compensation from their respective schools violated antitrust law. The case didn’t decide that athletes could get paid for their name, image and likeness, but it caused a domino effect that saw the NCAA legalize NIL opportunities for its member athletes.
Legalized NIL sponsorships allowed video game franchises like EA to pay athletes for the usage of their NIL in their products, addressing the core concern of the O’Bannon case. For example, those who signed up to appear in College Football 25 received $600 and a copy of the game as compensation. At the same time, some big-name athletes negotiated bigger deals as product partners, and some athletes sat it out all together.
If a college hockey game were to be created, athletes who appear in the game would have to be compensated for this NIL usage to be legal. So in the hypothetical scenario that a college hockey game existed and you wanted to play as one of the 18 Red Wings prospects in the NCAA this upcoming season? They’d have to sign up to be in it.
For a smaller sports like college hockey, how much would a publisher be willing to pay for athletes' NIL rights? That depends on the amount of revenue they think the game would make. There might be a way to license the NIL of big stars to appear in the game, but publishers would have to be very careful about their usage of auto-generated players. It was the existence of a left-handed power forward wearing No. 31 that caused O'Bannon to sue the NCAA because his NIL rights were violated, and simply auto-generating college teammates risks delving back into this complicated territory.
International Students
Just simply giving athletes money to be in a video game isn’t as easy as it sounds. Only some athletes can get paid — that is, the ones who have proper documentation. To make NIL money, athletes have to be American citizens or have employment authorization on a work visa. For athletes who come to the U.S. to play college hockey, they are usually granted an education visa that limits them to on-campus employment. In other words, they can’t make NIL without jumping through a marathon of hoops. As this primer from the University of Oregon lays out, most schools discourage their international students from trying to get NIL deals because any violations of visa rules can lead to the termination of their visa.
This is a significant roadblock for a sport like college hockey that rosters a lot of international athletes. Last season, 32% of men’s Division I hockey players hailed from outside the United States. For D-I women, an even higher 38% of players were from another country. If roughly a third of the leagues can’t receive NIL without some significant legal tinkering, is it even worth it for a company to try and make a game? Looking at last year’s rosters, some major stars are among the international athletes such as Maine’s Nadeau brothers and Michigan star T.J. Hughes. For women’s rosters, big names like PWHL No. pick Princeton’s Sarah Fillier and Wisconsin star Laila Edwards likely couldn’t be compensated as Canadian citizens playing in the U.S.
Maybe this could change in the future. In late April, Reps. Valeria Foushee and Mike Flood introduced the “Name, Image, and Likeness for International Collegiate Athletes Act” to Congress. The bill seeks to expand NIL rights for international athletes, allowing them to be employed and receive NIL benefits. If this eliminates the NIL hurdles for international athletes, then that could give a video game publisher a lot more leeway to sign college hockey’s stars.
Licensing these players' NIL through their own countries' hockey governing bodies could work, too. Canadian stars at the World Junior Championship and other international tournaments have seen their NIL brought into EA's NHL franchise through Hockey Canada, and the same rules might apply to a college hockey game. The willingness to do so is a big question.
General Interest
College football is a billion dollar industry, and so is college basketball. College hockey? Not so much.
According to research by Yahoo! Finance, men’s college hockey teams make around $2.5 million per school in sports-related revenues. By comparison, football rakes in $31.9 million per school and men’s basketball sits at $8.1 million.
There are certainly haves and have-nots among these sports, but hockey’s revenues pale in comparison to its peers. What drives the creation of a college sports video game? Money. EA and other potential publishers aren't going to invest in a product they can't turn a profit on.
So long as college hockey isn’t as lucrative as its athletics peers, then the likelihood of a college hockey game is unlikely.
Title IX
The purview of Title IX on NIL has been a hot-button issue recently, and it’s an issue that will come into play with any college sports video games.
For schools that participate in college athletics, Title IX requires that schools provide “substantially proportionate” opportunities for men and women. The important note here is that Title IX does not apply to private entities — EA, for example. But, schools participating in licensing agreements are subject to Title IX rules. This is something that the Department of Education affirmed just days ago.
As written in a statement to ESPN by Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for the DoE’s Office for Civil Rights, on July 16, "Schools must provide equal athletic opportunities based on sex, including with respect to benefits, opportunities, publicity, and recruitment, and must not discriminate in the provision of financial aid. In the new NIL environment, these same principles apply."
Schools are going to have to make sure their NIL opportunities are proportional — they can't funnel all their NIL partners to cut deals with their football and men's basketball teams, for example. This poses a major challenge to licensing materials to a college hockey game, which would almost certainly focus on the higher-marketed men's league.
The application of Title IX could also become more direct as the payment of athletes advances. NIL is giving way to direct revenue sharing, where schools can directly pay their athletes a cut of the money made by their athletics programs. These sports revenues include whatever a company like EA pays to license out the stadium, names, logos and more from a university. As an example of this system, if Michigan State gets paid to license out Munn Arena and the Spartans logo, then Trey Augustine and his teammates are due to receive a cut.
When it comes to a college hockey game, schools will have to ensure they provide an equal NIL opportunity to their men’s and women’s programs if they are a school that ices both teams. This means that even if EA and other publishers aren’t require to provide equal opportunities to men’s and women’s sports — in other words, they can favor marketing more traditionally profitable men’s sports — the schools on the other side might have to also find a way to compensate their female athletes, too.
One way to approach this is for any college hockey video game to include both men’s and women’s teams, but again this dives into the territory of profitability. The economic impacts of sexism means that women’s hockey doesn’t make as much money as men’s hockey, and thus its teams aren’t as lucrative partners as the men’s teams.
If colleges have to compensate men and women equally, and if a publisher only wants to pay to include one side of the sport, then there’s a legal impasse here. This is the kind of issue that ends up in a court ruling, just like Alston and O’Bannon.
Could a College Hockey Video Game Happen?
EA’s College Football 25 might open up the doors for games in other sports, but the process of adding a college hockey video game isn’t as simple as copying the football script. There are loads of legal and financial considerations that any publisher would have to solve.
One way to get college hockey into sports video games might be through EA's NHL franchise, which already licenses the logos and NIL of other leagues including the CHL. Perhaps EA could license college teams and players — even in a selective manner of just a few schools — to add them to the game.
Again, the issue is the willingness of EA to do all the extra work to make it happen. Users already see a lack of creativity from EA when it comes to its established game modes in the NHL series, so it's doubtful a college hockey add-on would be a high priority.
As cool as a college hockey game would be, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up for it to happen any time soon. But hey, college football took a decade to come back to shelves, and the legal environment of NIL and college sports changes with the rapidity of Michigan weather.
Maybe you’d be right to never stop believing.
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