EA Sports College Football 25 is back after 10 years with no NCAA games

polygon.com:

After nearly 10 years without an official college football game, Electronic Arts has finally revealed a teaser for the highly-anticipated return of its college football video game franchise. EA Sports College Football 25 will be released this summer, with a full reveal of the game coming in May. But for now, the company’s published a short hype video to reassure fans that, Yeah, it’s really happening.

The nearly two-minute video is largely live-action, but there are a few brief peeks at some of the in-game progress — stadiums, mascots, locker rooms, jerseys, and helmets.

If you’re not a college football fan or don’t follow sports video games, you might be wondering what the big deal is. There hasn’t been a new edition of the College Football franchise since NCAA Football 14, which had former University of Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson on the cover. The franchise is so beloved for college football fans that people are still playing the 10-year-old game — and updating it to stay current.

There’s very clearly a market for college football video games, but there’s a reason EA Sports hasn’t made a new game in so long: It legally couldn’t. For years, EA licensed the National Collegiate Athletic Association name from the NCAA, and school and conference likenesses from groups like the Collegiate Licensing Company. Because NCAA rules at the time made it so players could not make money off their own name and likeness, the games had to use “fake” players on the real teams, cutting players (who could not legally receive money from the game at the time) out of the significant profits. But those fake players more often than not were basically identical to the real players, with identical appearances, uniform numbers, and attributes, just with fake names.

Former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a lawsuit in 2009 against both the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company, arguing this practice violated antitrust laws; specifically, he pointed to how his likeness was