CNN Money reports “EA teams up with ESPN”. If you can’t beat em, buy em.

This is not good news. EA won’t throw a loving arm around the ESPN series’ current developer Visual Concepts. Instead EA will most likely continue development through the current Madden developer Tiberion Studios.

Sports games sell consoles and Football is the biggest selling sports genre on the market. EA has now squashed all football competition in just a few months. Visual Concepts (owned by Take Two Interactive) were once developers of the [IMHO] superior football franchise, but now the’ve lost both the NFL player rights AND their ESPN branding to the trans megacorp Electronic Arts. EA’s Madden Football had a huge majority of the market-share.. they really didn’t NEED to pull this crap. This sucks.

The new EA/ESPN deal has been reported to last for 15 years. Yes 15.