This series will never grow as long as EA is in charge. NHL 23’s woeful, stale, and copycat gameplay and modes just shows how dreadfully EA has run the franchise and how the series needs a competitor.
How EA has gotten away with their malignant stranglehold over the NHL franchise is beyond me.
I know I’ve already written an article about this game, but I just started playing it again and wanted to share my feeling about it now. And, needless to say, this game is still as awful now as it was when I gave my initial review a few months ago.
Everything from the gameplay, overemphasis on X-Factor talents, unrealistic defending and physic mechanics, copycat features and modes, to the practically nonexistent mode-polishing updates, NHL 23 is essentially a high-priced roster update of NHL 17. Yeah, there’s a few slight tweaks to how some format looks (such as in Franchise Mode), but 85% of the functionality is an identical replica of a game that came out nearly seven years ago.
There’s no gaming company in the world that could get away with producing near-identical sequels like EA has done as the fans would not only rightfully riot and complain, but such a situation wouldn’t happen because there’s no monopolization in play.
I mean, if Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was an identical sequel to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or Capcom’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was the exact same as Resident Evil Village (Resident Evil 8), these games would have failed, and the companies gone out of business after a while.
Why? It’s because there’s other alternatives (The Witcher series or Souls games for The Elder Scrolls; Left 4 Dead, The Evil Within, or Alien: Isolation for Resident Evil) made by equally talented game studios that destroys the monopolization/dominance of the, respective, genre.
Sure, the development times and practicalities of making yearly games (as the NHL series is) would force a studio to reuse a good percentage of ideas, codes, designs, etc., yet that doesn’t mean the game has to be the EXACT SAME THING year after year.
That just simply isn’t the case with EA and the NHL series.
Now, to be fair to EA, the company doesn’t have exclusive rights with the NHL to produce NHL games as the it has with the NFL to make the Madden series and had with FIFA for soccer/football games, but that fact shouldn’t matter when it’s the only hockey game publisher on the market. Though, that’s more of an industry problem than an EA one…which is why I’m writing this in the first place.
Yes, I title this “EA Domination of NHL Games Needs To End!”, but the reality is that the rest of the industry has to take a chance and nip this quasi-monopolization in the bud.
There will obviously be a few problems in making an NHL game as it is the least popular of the four major North American sports and EA’s control over the NHL series has doomed these types of games as D-listers, but that shouldn’t dissuade the likes of Sony, 2K (if they want to get back into making NHL games), Microsoft, or some other studio to take a chance on a new NHL-themed franchise.
(Electronic Arts-NHL 23-Official Presentation Deep Dive Trailer)
Even though the NHL is the “least popular” North American Sport, the NHL still earns north of $5B/year and is the de facto (if not officially) national sport of Canada (a nation of 38M). A great NHL game will attract interest and should be worth the price of a licensing agreement with the NHL and development costs, which should force EA to make the NHL games better.
Nevertheless, we’ll all be sadly forced to endure EA’s atrocious reign over the NHL’s video game adaptation market until a company grows brave enough to challenge them.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Electronic Arts) (NHL 23 Official Presentation Deep Dive Trailer – YouTube)
In Text Image 1: (Electronic Arts) (NHL 23 Official Presentation Deep Dive Trailer – YouTube)
