New Company Creates Generic Football Game, Expects to Topple Madden
A new company, Quick Hit Football, believes their new generic football game will be a huge success in the face of Madden, the monolithic, totalitarian ruling party of the football game market. Protip, guys: If you name your company after one game, you probably aren’t going to be successful.
The game really isn’t a bad idea at all, a combination of a sports MMO and a fantasy football league. I’m not a big follower of football (though I have been known to attend a UT Vols party now and then), or football games (other than Tecmo Bowl, the Greatest Sports Game Ever (TM)) but honestly, I’m intrigued enough to give it a try as soon as I get a chance, especially since finding out that Quick Hit Director of Design Brandon Justice is a former member of Visual Concepts, who you may remember as being responsible for every great sports game to come out since 2000, I.E. the 2K series.
That said, the most glaring problem with the game is that it is attempting to be a fantasy football game with generic players. Obviously, the target market is going to be football fans, many of whom have been known to become as obsessive with fantasy football as MMO players are with their drug of choice, so the idea of combining an actual playable game with the management and coaching features of fantasy leagues is genius, albeit a certain, obvious kind of genius. The problem comes with the fact that a big part of why people participate in fantasy leagues is that it adds an extra element to keeping up with real life football. Who’s going to follow a league full of imaginary players? Very few real football fans, I’d wager.
Quick Hit Football CEO Jeff Anderson says that his company performed studies of males aged 18-40 to determine if the presence of current NFL players is really necessary, and he says that the results were better than he thought, but he refuses to give an actual percentage of how many thought the license was needed. I think it’s also notable that the actual survey questions used weren’t quoted; if someone asked me “Is the NFL license necessary to making a good football video game?” I would of course answer no, but if I knew that the game revolved around fantasy football elements, that would completely change my answer. I’m not going to really care about how the Portland Marauders are doing, much less attempt to follow the career of their quarterback Steven Fong. And this coming from a man who followed the entire acting career of Johnny Cage.
Despite the obvious problems with attempting to get a football fan to follow the career of someone he’s not only never heard of, but who doesn’t even exist, I think there’s potential for success here, if not with casual gaming football fans, than perhaps with an actual hardcore audience. Madden obviously has a much bigger reach than the casual market, and even if we won’t admit it, I know plenty of nerds secretly enjoy sports games. Marketed properly and handled with care, this could be a huge hit.
(original story from Kotaku)
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