Welcome to our latest edition of Fact or Faction. Today we have five more topics that Charlie Sinhanseni, Charles Husemann, and John Yan discuss. And let`s get started with...

1) EA’s 5 year exclusive rights to the NFL and NFLPA license is a good thing.

Charlie Sinhaseni: Fiction. You know how people complain about Microsoft and its anti-trust tactics? Well forget all about that, because what EA does is a hell of a lot worse. At least Microsoft has the decency to pay its employees for all of their hard work. Screwing over its employees wasn’t enough, now it’s decided to screw over the consumer as well. A market rife with alternatives is a healthy one as it allows for competition and selection. Just look at this year as an example; SEGA was able to rise up from the ashes and deliver an excellent football game that absolutely killed EA’s franchise in every respect. How does EA handle this? Does it go back to the drawing board and improve upon the weaker aspects of the game? Nope, it simply eliminates its competition so that it can beat consumers over the head with the same game, year after year.

I could accept this if EA had produced a high quality football game year after year but it doesn’t. It shoves the same game down player’s throats, every single year. EA also has exclusivity deals with NASCAR but the NASCAR Thunder franchise is simply at the top of its sport. The Madden franchise isn’t and the ESPN franchise is just the far superior title, at the smaller price point as well. Remember, EA only lowered the price point of Madden to $39.99 after SEGA’s $19.99 price point took a huge chunk out of its profits. That brings up another point, with no competition, EA is free to charge the consumer whatever it pleases. Let’s just say that it won’t be thinking about charging $19.99 for next year’s game.

Shame on EA and shame on the NFL. You both just put dollar signs before the consumer. I can tell you right now that there’s one game I won’t be playing next year and that game is Madden 2006. Forget them, I hope that Visual Concepts releases a football game without the NFL license anyway. People will still buy it and some of the true fans will come through and offer places to download the NFL rosters, just like in the old Front Page Football days. This way all of the profits will go to the right place, to the hardworking programming team and not to the greedy money hungry whores who run the NFL.

On that same note, it should be pointed out that Midway is now making Blitz: Playmakers, a football game that features everything that the NFL likes to pretend doesn’t exist in its league. According to IGN, it’s a collaboration between the guys at Midway and a head writer from the TV show that ran on ESPN. It gained high ratings and critical acclaim but was canned when NFL started pressuring ESPN by threatening to pull its programming from the network. Now that I think about, maybe this whole exclusive deal isn’t such a bad thing. It’ll at least allow developers to make a football game that’s more realistic and devoid of all of the politicking and problems brought forth by the NFL and EA.

Charles Husemann: Fiction. The only real winner in this deal is the NFL since they managed toe extract a huge sum of cash from EA to pay for the rights. This means that EA will have to find a way to cover the added cost of the license which means more advertising in the games and less innovation in the title.

John Yan: Fiction. When I read this news, my first thought was to the great effort that Sega produced this year and how we`re probably not going to be treated to a quality football game for next year with real NFL players and teams. Yes, I can`t see EA signing this exclusive agreement and churning out a Madden game that wasn`t just like the year before only with a few twe...