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Andrew Wilson, EA Sports boss, took to the stage at Microsoft's Xbox One event and confirmed that EA and Microsoft have entered into a "special relationship." This will see four EA Sports games on Xbox One: FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14 and UFC. All four will launch within the next 12 months, Wilson said.

EA Sports Ignite, a new engine created at EA, will power each game, attempting to emulate human intelligence and true player motion within each games. There are "four times more calculations per second" to achieve this. FIFA 14 Ultimate Team will "only be on Xbox," Wilson concluded before showing off an EA Sports sizzle reel.

EA Sports' official NBA Live social media accounts sprang to life as recently as May 17 after being on hiatus since late September 2012. A recent tweet from the NBA Live team's Twitter account indicates that the game may be part of today's Xbox presentation, teasing fans with the words "Countdown to tip-off."

It wouldn't be far-fetched to believe NBA Live will have a presence at today's event, given the expectation that both FIFA and EA Sports UFC will be shown, or at least teased in some capacity. NBA Live was also listed among the publisher's 11 games planned for fiscal 2014, and will be a next-gen title. This comes after NBA Live 13 was canceled in September 2012, two years after NBA Elite 11 was also canceled and the same point at which the NBA Live team's social media accounts stopped updating. That brings us full-circle, like a basketball.

With both the new UFC game and now NBA Live saying to expect news today, and FIFA already confirmed, signs point to EA Sports having some kind of ensemble appearance at the next Xbox event this afternoon.

If they can live with themselves, NFL fans will be able to do some truly sick and depraved things this year with the new Madden video game. Like charge fans $30 for a beer. Like buy out the Green Bay Packers. Like drive that franchise down to Mexico in the middle of the night, and abandon it there. Yes, "Owner mode," with all of the chortling, finger-tenting malevolence you care to bring to it, rejoins Madden NFL 25's all-in-one career suite, now called "Connected Franchise." The restored football tycoon role will add another layer of control and role-playing in how you represent and manipulate your club, and a different path to enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "Being able to bring it back was a big deal for me," Mike Young, the game's creative director, told me. "I was a big fan of that. I'd always take over the Arizona Cardinals, move them to Toronto, be the first Canadian Super Bowl Champion—then fire my coach and go hire a new one." Owner-level decision-making—ticket prices, stadium renovations and the like—was absent in Madden NFL 13 as it introduced the new "Connected Careers" package, which allowed players controlling an entire team as a coach, or those playing as an individual superstar, to participate in the same league. Team owner becomes the third career role one can assume—either through creating yourself or inhabiting the persona of one of the league's real-world bosses. Though not all 32 are yet confirmed to appear, Young expressed confidence that every franchise's honcho will be signed up by the time the game ships, including such names as New England's Robert Kraft, Atlanta's Arthur Blank, or Dallas' notorious Jerry Jones. "You'll see them in the game in 3D animations," Young said, in camera shots of the executive suite during the action. "If you win the Super Bowl, you'll be up there on the podium, getting handed the Lombardi Trophy." Playing as a franchise owner will involve more than just some cutscenes slapped over the total control of playcalling and personnel that the coach career path already has. Owners will be tasked with managing the franchise's image and profitability, will hire and fire staff, improve their stadium or build a new one, and will have to answer for fans' expectations of the team based on personnel ratings and how it performed in the previous year. "Fan happiness," a weekly temperature-taking that can deliver a boost to your bottom line, depends on what you're charging at the gate, what they pay for concessions (and what kind of concessions they get), whether the players are any good, and other factors. Winning, of course, cures most, if not all problems. "We looked at the Philadelphia Eagles 'Dream Team' scenario in 2011, for example," Young said, referring to the expectations the club faced—and failed— that year after signing a slew of high profile free agents in the preseason. "With every loss, people were freaking out; with each win, the reaction was, yeah, we expect to win." A team with a similar makeup will deal with similar fan sentiment, Young said, coming in the form of weekly news conferences in which you must answer knife-twisting questions from the media. "We really wanted it to be choosing the lesser of two evils," Young said. "We really want to make you sweat it, because the answers will also impact fan happiness." For example, if your team starts 0-5, you can expect to make a statement of confidence, or no confidence, in the team's coach. Stick by him, and if the team continues to lose, fan happiness really plunges into the toilet. Throw him under the bus and fans will get restless, knowing that with a coaching change coming, the season may as well be written off. I asked Young if "fan happiness" delivered any boost beyond financial gain to your franchise, and he said no. Players on a team with happy fans will not see attribute increases, nor is there any morale system with a good or bad knock-on effect coming from it. Fan happiness' impact is on your financial bottom line, which provides the money needed to put a successful product on the field. (Some players may be more valuable to you simply because they sell merchandise, despite their talent on the field.) "Say you have a 3-5 start with a 90 rated roster," Young said. 'That's a team with playoff expectations, and the media will ask if you still expect to go to the postseason. If you're the St. Louis Rams and you're 3-5 and you say you expect to go to the Super Bowl, then Skip Bayless will go into our Twitter feed and come out and say 'I never thought this team was a playoff team, what is he saying?' "But if you're the Baltimore Ravens in the same situation, and you say, 'Yeah, we're going to the postseason,' then you'll see people say, 'With this kind of roster, I'd expect him to say something like that. This team should be in the postseason.'" Keeping fans happy is what keeps money flowing to you to do all the owner-ly things you need to do to amass a "Legacy Score" that one day puts your bust in Canton. If your team still wins (or if you make it win) you can succeed, even if you go out of your way to alienate everyone—like charge New York concession prices in Jacksonville, hold the franchise hostage as you negotiate stadium renovations, or even move it outright. That's where playing as an owner intrigues me the most. In years past, if you moved the team, you were forced to rename it, remake their uniforms, and give it a nearly generic logo from a terrible clip-art package. Now you'll be given the option of keeping the team's name and colors (an extra knife in the back to the fans you left). Or, if you want to rebrand it, you'll be given a series of logos, uniforms and nickname choices that are designed with the sensibilities of the 17 potential relocation cities—Mexico City, Toronto, Dublin and London included—in mind. "Like Austin, Texas, one of the choices you get if you move there is the Bats, because there are a lot of bats that hang under a bridge down there," Young said. (You may not enter a wildcard nickname of your own making.) You'll be allowed to move your franchise once its home stadium falls under a certain score (a restriction that can be turned off, too.) Teams in newer stadia will have to wait longer before that becomes an option. Incidentally, if you play as the San Francisco 49ers, your first season will be in venerable Candlestick Park, and then you will move to the newly christened Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., meaning that venue will debut in Madden NFL 25 a year before it will in real life. Once you're done running a team into the ground in a place like Birmingham, Ala., you can always retire your owner—as you could a player or coach last year—and pick up from that point with a new franchise in any other role. So after moving the Packers to Mexico, you could destroy Cleveland once more by sending the Browns to Houston (some markets, Houston and Chicago among them, support two-team scenarios) and then become a running back for either team if you're tired of scouting and negotiating stadium leases. Connected Franchise will have other inclusions and restored features that benefit more than just the ownership class. Players of EA Sports' NCAA Football game will once again be able to import a draft class into Madden, a feature that went missing last year. "You won't see the stories about draft prospects in the Twitter feed," Young said, "but you will still be able to go in and scout them and do everything else that you do with the draft in the off-season." Full control of all 32 teams in an offline season also has been restored, Young said, a nod to dorm and living-room couch rivalries that went on hiatus in Connected Careers' debut last season. "We're bringing back a lot of rituals we had," Young said. "Guys who remember, 'Me and my friend, we played this league on the couch, I was the Browns and he was the Steelers.' On top of that, it's also for the control freaks. It's for the guys who want to play every game and then go edit the facemasks and the sock heights. "You can play the tycoon parts of the game, simply for the money aspects, and ignore or simulate the games; but if you want to scout the entire draft board, you can, too. It's your team," Young said. "You can do whatever you want." To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

If it wasn't obvious at its launch in November, then this past week should have made it clear: The Wii U is functionally irrelevant to sports video games, and there is no reason for any sports fan to buy the console. The only question now is how much that will really matter to the fate of the machine. Several intemperate, since-deleted tweets from an EA Sports software architect on Friday, slamming the Wii U as "crap," and Nintendo as a console-maker with a self-centered, stone-age approach, may cause that guy a lot of trouble internally. I doubt he loses his job for it. Words are but the skin of thoughts, and he's worked with EA Sports for a very long time. For termination to be on the table, he'd have to be jeopardizing some productive and profitable working relationship with such candid and unauthorized remarks. If EA's own official and authorized statements preceding the outburst are any indication, then none exists. Alienating the Nintendo constituency, however sensitive it may be, is meaningless if you're not even making games for it to buy. And Electronic Arts isn't. The world's largest maker and seller of sports video games straight up told Kotaku on Thursday it has not a thing in development for the Wii U. Then, to Eurogamer on Friday, an official company statement blamed the "disappointing" sales performance of FIFA 13 on the Wii U as the reason the series wouldn't make another version for the console. Madden was confirmed out a couple of weeks before that. Elsewhere, NBA 2K14 remains "TBA" for its release in October, with WWE 2K14 specifically named for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 only. Despite the Wii's stepchild status in the core-gaming discussion for the past eight years, it still had a more meaningful presence in the sports genre in any year than its high-definition successor does in its debut, especially in the sports where its motion controller was naturally suited. Yes, EA Sports embarrassed itself with outsourced, de-rigeur ports of its team sports franchises like Madden—not to mention last year's scandalously retreaded FIFA 13, in some ways worse than what MLB 2K13 attempted to pass off. Still, Tiger Woods PGA Tour's Wii version was, through 2011, the critical winner against all other platforms; Grand Slam Tennis—remember that old thing?—had a solid Wii-only release in 2011 before it thudded on the core consoles in 2012. Today, if you want to play golf or tennis on the Wii U—not an unreasonable expectation given the Wii brand's whitebread family reputation—you have to do it with a used copy of Wii Sports or Wii Sports Resort. Even ice hockey, in 2010, was once a hot topic on the Wii. Three years ago, 2K Sports scrapped its NHL 2K series but stuck with its Wii edition because, despite being a standard-definition port of a team simulation, it still sold well with Canadian moms. That year, EA Sports decided to horn in on the turf with NHL Slapshot, featuring a mini-hockey stick peripheral that I still love fooling with. At E3 2010, I asked a 2K Sports representative why they didn't try the same thing, given the explosion of cheap plastic peripherals on that console. "Oh, we tried," he groaned. Nintendo just didn't dig their pitch. Along came EA Sports though, with clout and cash, and they got approval. Anecdotally, it speaks to the arbitrary success and failure awaiting third-party publishers, going back generations, on platforms built by Nintendo, for Nintendo. Does any of this really matter? Nintendo may have done just fine, going back to the DS, with a platform suited only to one developer—itself. But even if cartoony sports offerings like EA's embarrassing All-Play series, or token "core" games like The Conduit, Red Steel or Madworld, were sales losers—as the EA Sports tweeter obstreperously, and correctly, reminded us—their presence nominally bootstrapped the Wii to a high-definition hardware generation in which it did not belong. Now, two days before Microsoft unveils its next console, with EA and EA Sports removing its Nintendo commitment—and 2K Sports sure to follow—the Wii U does not even have that. If the Wii U wasn't faced with being a technological backwater after two years, it's looking at being a niche platform in its first. Sure, Sega—and God, after Aliens: Colonial Marines, what a desperate operation that must be right now—locked arms with Nintendo for three exclusive Sonic the Hedgehog titles on Wii U. That means a treacly minigame collection like Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is the only licensed sports title, for the foreseeable future, on the Wii U. I wish it did not come to this. Despite the tone of my remarks above, the only two pieces of gaming hardware I have bought, with my own money, on their day of release are the Wii U and the 3DS—and I recently upgraded to a 3DS XL. As I have written, if the Wii U GamePad was properly used, it could be a godsend in the sports genre—as a yardage book in Tiger Woods PGA Tour; as a recruiting notebook in NCAA Football; as a whiteboard on the sideline in NBA 2K14. Menu sludge is a plague to sports unlike any other genre, and Lord knows how it could help streamline storylines and matchmaking in WWE's career modes. Maybe this would work if Nintendo was the only, or the clearly dominant console maker, and games were developed for it and then ported to other hardware with the unique features stripped out. Those days are gone forever. Console publishing today is like a series of high-class parties on the same night. Sure, you can have a strict dress code. The B-list guests will be there if they they can wear the same outfit from another event. The A-list will be there if it's worth being seen. Stick Jockey is Kotaku's column on sports video games. It appears Sundays. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Yesterday, EA Sports announced a $100 "Anniversary Edition" for Madden NFL 25 that will include a code offering buyers access to DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket—the channel that lets you watch any team outside of your local market—even if they aren't subscribers to the satellite TV service. There's been a bit of confusion as to what all this means. Yes, DirecTV is doing the deal because it hopes football fans might ditch their cable provider and sign up with them. But even if you live in an area with DirecTV access, and choose not to subscribe, you may still use the code to watch Sunday Ticket games on your computer, tablet or other mobile device. You don't have to subscribe to DirectTV. That comes from Anthony Stevenson, Madden's director of marketing, clearing up some confusion from the official announcement yesterday. "With this offer you don't need to be a directv subscriber," he said today via Twitter. "You can access Sunday Ticket digitally." Of course, you can't watch Sunday Ticket on a TV (unless you rig it up as your PC or mobile's display, I suppose) so DirecTV wants you to so fall in love with the Red Zone channel, and not being shackled to the Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars or a Parade of Homes infomercial if your team is blacked out, that you're willing to slap a dish on the side of your house. That's up to you. The "anniversary edition" is $40 more than the regular one, of course, but speaking as someone who's gone without any kind of TV service other than Netflix and MLB.tv for the past year, that's decent value. Only a "limited number" of these editions will be sold so, obviously, it's a big preorder come on. The official news release said simply that the "unique code" included in the box was "for fans unable to receive DirecTV service." The other bullet points implied those that did have access to DirectTV would have to sign up to take advantage of the code. "Offers like this are complex and have to be written a certain way," Stevenson explained later. "Believe me, I wish it was easier too." Yesterday, Stevenson also fielded questions from ESPN about the notorious exclusive license EA Sports has to make NFL video games. “We’re not able to comment on negotiations, but the NFL continues to be an amazing partner for us," he said. "Our relationship is stronger than it has ever been, I’ll say that, but I can’t comment on contracts or rights.” That sounds like a renewal is imminent to me, not that the NFL really has much of an option at this point. Also, regarding the unusual name for this year's edition—Madden NFL 25, which refers to the 25th anniversary edition of the game, not the year 2025. "“Just because we’re Madden NFL 25 this year doesn’t mean that we have to be Madden NFL 26 next year or even Madden NFL 15," he said. More ammo for the theory that EA Sports will shift its flagship titles to a downloadable subscription model—obviating the need for annual releases or titles that describe them—once the next console generation arrives. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Days before the next Xbox's unveiling, NBA Live's social media decides to come out of hibernation. It had been totally silent since NBA Live 13's abrupt cancellation in September.

At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as "crap" and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. "The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet," tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. "Nintendo are walking dead at this point." Though the tweets, made early yesterday morning, have since been deleted, screenshots of them mushroomed across multiple sites, most prominently on NeoGAF. Summerwill didn't let up after that first tweet. "Nintendo are still operating like it's 1990," he goes on, saying it should have gotten out of the hardware business and made its Mario and Legend of Zelda franchises exclusives on either the PlayStation 4 or next Xbox. "Instead, they make this awful console," he added. Then, of EA's withdrawal from developing for Wii U, he said, "It is an utterly intentional decision to focus our resources on markets which actually matter." Kotaku has attempted to contact Summerwill. An EA Sports spokesman at the publisher's headquarters gave this statement: EA has a strong partnership and an active agreement with Nintendo to develop games for the WiiU. Last year we released Mass Effect 3 and several of our EA Sports titles on that platform. So far, we have not announced any new titles for Wii U this year, but that does not preclude more games in the future. However, earlier this week, EA spokesman Jeff Brown confirmed to Kotaku that the company has zero games under development for Wii U. Later reports verified that means FIFA, one of the world's biggest selling games among all genres, will not release a version for the console this year. That goes for Madden NFL 25 as well, another enormous seller in North America. Summerwill's comments recall another Twitter flap not long ago; in early April, Adam Orth, then a creative director for Microsoft, said that those with reservations about a console with an always-on requirement should just "deal with it." Microsoft later apologized for the remarks, and Orth is said to be no longer with the company. EA Sports Engineer: Wii U is crap, < powerful than 360. No $ 3party. [NeoGAF, via GoNintendo]

Since Madden NFL 25 skipped 12 years is named to commemorate the series' 25th anniversary, it shouldn't be surprising that EA Sports recently unveiled a special Anniversary Edition. What is a little surprising are the contents of the special edition, which includes a free one-year subscription for DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket service, allowing fans to watch every out-of-market NFL game throughout the season.

EA Sports tells us that the subscription is limited to the NFL Sunday Ticket computer, tablet and mobile service. Additionally, those who are able to receive DirecTV service in their area can get $10 off per month for the service, which starts at $225, as well as a free subscription to the higher-tier NFL Sunday Ticket MAX.

The Anniversary Edition of Madden 25 is exclusive to Amazon, and limited to 50,000 copies on each of the game's platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3 (100,000 copies total). It will also include complimentary Madden Ultimate Team card packs every week of the NFL's 17-week regular season. Madden 25's Anniversary Edition is available to pre-order now on Amazon for $99.99.

While we learned in April that NCAA Football 14 will include its own Ultimate Team mode this year, EA Sports announced details on how it will operate today. The mode will include more than 1,400 former college football players at the game's launch, as well as both solo and special head-to-head challenges. Ultimate Team is the long-running mode that spans most of EA Sports' properties, which combines standard on-field gameplay with a card-collecting system for building and managing your team.

NCAA 14's version of Ultimate Team will also include a head-to-head season mode, in which players match up against one another with their specially crafted teams in a 10-game season, before entering an end-of-the-season tournament. Players can earn rewards along the way for toppling challenges that increase in difficulty, such as coins for procuring more card packs.

The game will receive similar treatment in the mode that other EA Sports games got in the past, with challenges and card collections being added throughout the real-life football season. NCAA 14 is slated to launch July 9 on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Around this time each year, Madden bombards us with the annual list of improvements they say they've made to the defense. And when the game gets arrives, I'm still usually playing it as I have for years: by calling a play and letting the CPU deal with it. But one new move does look useful for a tool like me. What is it? Well, for the few times I do want to get in on the action, it's a comfort knowing that when I completely overrun the play with my safety or linebacker, they'll be able to cut back, recover, and resume pursuit more quickly. "Heat seeker tackling" looks like a souped up defensive-assist, I might use that. The rest of the stuff they describe is going to take some serious hands-on time (which I have not had) with the final product (which arrives at the end of August) to judge the merit of the claim. It seems that this latest discussion is designed to address fears that the offense was becoming overpowered with modifier-button jukes and spins and shoves and the like. They'll be countered with the Hit Stick. Introduced nine years ago and one of the game's very few annual bells and whistles to stand the test of time, is supposed to be more functional with the game's real time physics, EA Sports says. Hitting a ball carrier with the Hit Stick while he is performing a "special precision modifier move" increases the possibility of causing a fumble. Hitting a receiver with the titular stick at the right time is supposed to increase the chance of breaking up the pass. (I hope that just spamming the stick also increases the chance of pass interference.) You can see a lot of gameplay in the video above, and read more details about the changes in the "playbook" posted today. Madden developers likely know that, for many players, the only chore bigger than playing defense is trying to make it interesting. It's good to see that the running, momentum, and cutbacks introduced for offensive players should have some counterpart benefit on defense. It's nice to know they're trying to make the physics more functional than just supplying cool-looking hits and stumble-tackles. It's good to see that when I spaz and send my cornerback at maximum speed into the sideline, he'll be able to reverse direction before ending up in the concessions stand. I still think I'll probably be calling a play and letting the CPU deal with it, as I have for years. Playing Defense in Madden NFL 25 [EA Sports]

There will be real football players, using their real names, in the debut of NCAA Football Ultimate Team this year. They just won't be anyone suiting up on a college football field this fall. A deal with the NFL Players' Association will give NCAA the rights to use 2,500 current NFL stars, pictured in their alma maters' uniforms, and build a pool of virtual trading cards just as large as Madden Ultimate Team, where the collection-and-player-management game has been running since 2010. "It was weird receiving an email saying the NCAA franchise was approved by the NFLPA," said producer Ben Haumiller, who added that individual negotiations are ongoing to bring retired stars into the game, with an eye toward signing up more after the game's July launch. It's a shrewd way for NCAA Football to solve its biggest problem—the fact that, legally and under NCAA bylaws, they may not use actual, active college player likenesses in the game (though there is a massive legal dispute over whether that is in fact taking place anyway.) A game built on a population of fictitious players would have nowhere near the appeal of Madden, FIFA or Hockey Ultimate Team—just ask Diamond Dynasty, a variant of the format introduced by MLB The Show last year, which remains an outlier in terms of appeal. By contrast, MUT, FUT and HUT as they're known, have been enormous drivers of microtransaction revenue to EA Sports, and now—what, NUT?—will be expected to do the same. That was the business mandate. Creatively, Haumiller said he wanted Ultimate Team in his game as a point of pride. "It's a feature that's become a gold standard, to show you are on the top tier of team sports games," he said. "We're the No. 3 seller in North America in sports games; we know we need it. How, that was the question." One floor up at EA Tiburon, of course, are the Madden guys, who already share a gameplay development team with NCAA—and, it bears mentioning, its Ultimate Team developers also are the ones building NCAA's version. So you can expect this version to play very close, if not identically, to Madden Ultimate Team. A key difference will be in the solo challenges and 10 game seasons—with a playoff and "relegation"—that NUT will mimic from the extremely popular FIFA Ultimate Team. "While we don't have a true college football playoff yet, we do have it here in Ultimate Team," notes Haumiller. The mishmash of uniform styles, playing fields, boosts and special cards will be present in addition to the very diverse lineup stocked with players from more than 120 teams, some going back into the mid-1990s. "You can have Penn State's uniforms, in Autzen Stadium, with Drew Brees as your quarterback," Haumiller said. Or something truly loathsome, like Tim Tebow being cheered at Doak Campbell Stadium. The difference is there will be no coaches, as much for the licensing as for the time needed to reasonably model that many. Another key advantage of using Madden Ultimate Team assets is that, for many of the younger players anyway, the facial modeling can be repurposed in NCAA, too. What is most curious about NCAA Ultimate Team will be discovering who isn't in the game. All schools had to sign off on a player appearing under their name in the game. USC KGB'd Dolphins running back Reggie Bush out of existence at Heritage Hall after an improper benefits scandal resulted in major sanctions against the athletics program (and the forfeiture of Bush's Heisman Trophy.) With Bush persona non grata as a Trojan, he will not appear in the game at all. But Tyrann Mathieu, kicked off of LSU's team last year for reported drug problems, has been welcomed back to Tigerland, assuming he signs with the Arizona Cardinals. (Rookies this year cannot appear in any NFLPA licensed game until they sign with an NFL team, effectively joining the union.) But there also will be some all-time greats who are no longer in uniform for any team reappearing in this game. The players from last year's Heisman Challenge mode are all expected to return (some are still negotiating an extension for their appearance)—and that also means Heisman Challenge itself will return, as well. It also means Kirk Herbstreit, the ESPN analyst who played for Ohio State from 1989 to 1992, but never professionally, will suit up in scarlet and gray again. Herbstreit has been the video game's color commentary voice for more than a decade. "That was the first question we got back from his agent: 'Well, what are his ratings gonna be?'" Haumiller laughed. "Kirk is an esteemed member of the NCAA family and as such, we will definitely take care of him." Ratings will prove tricky in another area: Representing all schools (and they will all have players in the card population, some more than others) and fairly rating their past stars. Utah State's greatest player ever may seem quite average next to one from a powerhouse school. And then there's the matter of what to do about players from Division I-AA (sorry, "Football Championship Subdivision") teams. This issue has yet to be resolved, but Haumiller said that while they have the rights to a guy like Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco, their college licensing does not include the FCS division. "Flacco made his name at Delaware," which is a I-AA school, "but he did transfer over there from Pitt," Haumiller said. Maybe that's the solution. Conceptually, NCAA Ultimate Team can be given credit for introducing the Ultimate Team concept to the college game in a safe and legal way. It can also be viewed as a reconditioned version of Madden Ultimate Team, which has run college-themed specials in its card collections before. If longtime players of the series may feel no compulsion to jump into Ultimate Team, then to be honest, they're not the segment EA Sports is going after here. It's looking for crossover with the Maddenites, particularly those who would buy NCAA as a tide-me-over in July, and will try hook them with the card game so they don't trade NCAA in when Madden releases in August. It might flow the other way, too, that NCAA Ultimate Team becomes someone's an introduction to Madden's. Whatever EA Sports gets out of this will be gravy, but with Ultimate Team being rumored for inclusion in NBA Live 14, it's clear the feature was long overdue for NCAA, whether hardcore fans were demanding it or not. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

FIFA is a beautiful representation of the beautiful game, but that all falls apart once you hit the series' sluggish and confusing menu screens. So hats off to Brazilian fan/designer Rodrigo Bellão, who has a nice and clean idea for improvements.

EA Sports' former executive producer on NCAA Football testified that the game "generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness." EA and the NCAA are defendants in a potential class-action suit over the unauthorized use of college players' likenesses.

It's not just the NFL that EA Sports has on lockdown. The publisher announced today that it's also got FIFA on the hook until 2022.

EA has revealed that 11 new titles are headed to consoles and PC during its 2014 fiscal year (which began on April 1, 2013 and will run through March 31, 2014).

Women won't make an appearance in FIFA 14, despite an insistent campaign of petitions to include them and a summit, last year, that left one organizer with the feeling that it was just a matter of time before women would be included in the world's most popular video game for the world's most popular sport. Three weeks ago, in this interview, FIFA producer Sebastian Enrique ruled out the appearance of women in EA Sports' upcoming football simulation by saying, "there are no plans at the moment." Enrique said including women would require a different physics model specific to those players, plus new player modeling and even hairstyles. I followed up with EA Canada, the studio that builds FIFA, and was told, by executive producer David Rutter, that women's soccer would not make an appearance in FIFA this year. It's noteworthy still for a couple of reasons: The addition, in 2011, of women players to EA Sports' NHL series (in their Be a Pro mode, and as an option in creating players elsewhere; two women also were included on a roster of all-time greats last year). And this year also saw, for the first time ever, the LPGA and one of its major tournaments included in a golf video game for consoles. And it's noteworthy because women's soccer is, as a participation and a spectator sport, more popular than women's golf or hockey. Fernanda Schabarum, a Brazilian living and working in South Florida, last year opened an online petition to demand women's inclusion in FIFA. It gained enough attention that David Rutter, the series' executive producer, met with her. "He said it's going to happen at some point, and he hopes EA is the one to do it, and do it right," Schabarum told Kotaku last year. Rutter, for his part, told Kotaku the same thing at the time, but said issues of licensing, of gameplay balance and meaningful inclusion in a main game mode, and other considerations kept it from being the kind of easy add-on some assume it would be. "Nothing has changed since our last interview," Rutter said today. "As a team we have discussed at length the inclusion of female characters in FIFA, and whilst it's something that remains on our list of features for consideration as part of our mission statement above, we do not have plans to put female characters into the game this year." On a hunch, I asked directly if female footballers would be an inclusion in the next-generation console versions of FIFA, for reasons of disc space, system power or whatever. Rutter didn't answer that and the statement "we do not have plans to put female characters into the game this year," would seem to be a definitive "no" considering EA Sports has said FIFA will be available on new consoles at their launch. Maybe this will change next year, but we had the same thought in the last one, too. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

FIFA, we kid because we love. You are one of the Big Four—the best sports video games each year. But you know the risks of having a real-time physics engine: It means the occasional noggin' knockin' (and salad-tossin') in this anthology of wild moments via Rooster Teeth's Achievement Hunter. (NSFW language.)

A recent blog from EA Tiburon provided more specific examples of how Madden 25's combo moves for ball-carriers would operate. The latest trailer for the game shows off some of the noted moves, such as stutter steps, back jukes and the runner's newfound ability to recover from stumbling.

Madden NFL continues to teach Europeans how to play football.

EA Canada recently detailed NHL 14's Collision Physics in a developer diary video and blog. New to the hockey game this year are left stick hits, where the speed and momentum of skaters can cause big hits without the use of the right joystick. Right stick hitting controls are still accessible in the game.

The Collision Physics system, which borrows from the FIFA series' Player Impact Engine, introduces more ragdoll reactions to players suffering hits, including the goalie. EA Canada says NHL 14 will also see less hip check spamming and more incidental contact due to the game demanding better player positioning. Likewise, the developer says the system will make better use of a player's individual attributes for keeping their balance and delivering hits on opponents.

EA has confirmed reports that Madden NFL 25 will not be coming to Wii U.

NCAA Football 14 will include a longtime player request—new playing camera angles, including the "all-22" view of an offensive or a defensive coordinator. The cameras will be available in all modes, including the "Road to Glory" career mode.

NBA Live 14, assuming it ships, figures to add an Ultimate Team mode, if a developer's bio is any indication. I asked and EA Sports said no comment. If true, it probably means they're building a full retail product, not the $20 downloadable that NBA Live 13 was rumored to be.

The puck dropped an hour ago on the Stanley Cup playoffs, and NHL 13's official simulation has the New York Rangers winning the whole thing, beating Chicago in six in the finals. Get your bets down now. C'mon. No way you can lose.

Among the news of all-time great Barry Sanders gracing the cover of Madden NFL 25, EA Sports recently announced two of the series' marquee changes due this year: improvements to the Infinity Engine and a new running game feature called "Run Free."

Run Free promises 30 new ball-carrier combo moves. Using the left trigger, ball-carriers will stutter step before slowing down, enabling combo moves through the use of the right stick on the controller. While past games allowed players to use the right stick to take a step in one direction, then rotate in the other direction to spin away from defenders, these were separate animations. Run Free's system combines these animations.

Changes to the Infinity Engine - the physics engine that powers the series - include the same improvements such as the Force Impact system announced for NCAA Football 14. Madden will share avoidance animations with NCAA 14, with runners sticking their arms out to push off their blockers instead of taking awkwardly sensitive collision tackles. EA Tiburon has promised run blocking improvements, which has especially been needed since the introduction of the engine last year.

Barry Sanders may have once appeared on the cover of Madden, but he was, technically, never its cover star, subjected to the fame, celebrity and, yes, the curse that supposedly goes with it. Now he will, thanks to the fans. Sanders, the Detroit Lions' hall-of-fame running back, prevailed over the Minnesota Vikings' reigning MVP Adrian Peterson in the third tournament-style vote off for the cover of Madden NFL. The results were announced moments ago on ESPN's SportsNation program. More than 40 million votes were cast over the six-week promotion. A ten-time All-Pro selection, Sanders last played in 1998. He was in an action shot in the background of the Madden NFL 2000 cover, the last time John Madden appeared on the box and the last cover preceding the era of the Madden cover star. Sanders triumphed in a final round matchup that reflected two rival constiuencies—not only Peterson's Vikings versus Sanders' Lions, both NFC North members, but also Oklahoma (Peterson's alma mater) and Oklahoma State (Sanders'). It is also, strangely enough, the second consecutive year a Detroit Lion will appear on the cover. Wide receiver Calvin Johnson won last year's balloting, defeating Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton. Sanders went through San Francisco 49ers hall of famers Joe Montana and Jerry Rice to reach the finals, disposing of Raider great Marcus Allen and the recently retired Ray Lews of the Baltimore Ravens along the way. Montana and Rice were seeded first in their regions for purposes of the draw; Sanders came in as a third seed in Montana's grouping. Peterson was expected to go deep in the tournament and didn't disappoint. He won three huge blowouts before clobbering rookie quarterback sensation Robert Griffin III by more than two-to-one, setting up a semifinal in which he routed Houston running back Arian Foster by almost the same margin. Peterson's 2012 was one of the greatest seasons any running back has ever registered, including 2,097 yards rushing, the second most in league history. He also owns the league record for most rushing yards in a single game (296) set in his rookie year. Sanders was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2004, and once rushed for 100 yards in 14 consecutive games, still an NFL record. He is widely acknowledged as one of the top three or four running backs in pro football history, who would own every significant career record had he not retired so abruptly in 1998. Madden NFL 25, so named because this is the 25th anniversary year of the game, goes on sale Aug. 27. Top image by Tom Pidgeon|Getty

Monday, Madden's publicity operation notified writers that its "playbooks"—the weeks in which they discuss features of the upcoming game—begin this week. In it, "Connected Careers," the mode introduced last year, was rebranded as "Connected Franchise." A GameStop listing sheds a little more light on what that could mean. It means, I think, that in addition to playing a season as an existing or created player or coach , you can do so as a franchise owner. That's because Eddie DeBartolo, Jr., former owner of the San Francisco 49ers (pictured above in 1985), is available in a "Franchise Pack" offered as a preorder bonus through GameStop. DeBartolo is included with Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, who would form the coach and player ends of a "Connected Franchise." Owner mode went missing with last year's introduction of Connected Careers, which unified the game's franchise, superstar and online leagues. The old owner mode was more or less like franchise, except it allowed you to do things like set beer prices, hire football staff and move the team if you wanted (though doing so forced you to rebrand the team and all of the logo options sucked.) DeBartolo's inclusion likely means that's making some kind of a reappearance. This is interesting on another level because, as PastaPadre noted a week ago, Walmart is offering a "Raiders Franchise Pack," though its contents were unknown. I'm betting it means you get Madden himself as the coach, Tim Brown as a player, and Al Davis, which would be awesome. I'd move the Raida Organization five times with him even if the logo options still suck. Yes, I know that Marcus Allen would be a more logical choice as a performer, but putting him in a bonus alongside Al Davis would be aaaaaa-mazing given the bad blood between those two. For those wondering, EA plans to start talking about "Connected Franchise" on May 6, so I guess we'll find out then. Tonight, right after the Madden NFL 25 cover star is named (ESPN2 at 8 p.m.), they'll begin as they usually do, with some granular gameplay stuff, probably along the lines of what NCAA Football 14 discussed a couple weeks ago, as the two titles share a core gameplay development team. Retailer Pre-Order Bonus for Madden NFL 25 Hints at Owner Mode [PastaPadre]

Following last year's successful demonstration of democracy through NHL.com, NHL 14 will ask hockey fans to once again vote for their favorite cover athlete. Fans may choose from an initial list of sixty players, with voting taking place across two rounds that will be followed by a 16-player bracket to narrow down NHL 14's cover captain.

The winning player will be revealed later this year during the Stanley Cup Finals. The initial round of voting is going on now; you can see the full list of sixty eligible players through the source link below. Last year, over 25 million votes for the inaugural NHL Cover Vote campaign were registered, awarding the cover spot to Philadelphia Flyer's captain Claude Giroux.

NHL 14 skates off to retail on Xbox 360 and PS3 September 10 in North America, September 13 in Europe.

No, sports fans are not thoroughly fatigued by social media-driven cover votes. What gives you that crazy idea? So after Madden gives us either Barry Sanders or Adrian Peterson on Wednesday, you can enjoy another monthlong tournament as NHL 14 selects its star.