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GamingBolt: What The Hell Happened To Fight Night?

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman


To many boxing fans who also like video games, the perfect gaming analogue to their favorite sport has been the Fight Night series for a long time. Many know it today as the go-to EA Sports franchise for ultra-realistic boxing that was somewhat regularly released back in the early-to-mid 2000s. Even today the facial damage and fighting styles of certain famous boxers is pretty impressive despite the games being a decade or more old. Collision detection and realistic visual representation of the action on-screen were top-notch and had to be for the games to be successful.

And for a time, they were successful. With 5 games developed in the series (many more depending on where you feel the series truly started) and pretty decent reception throughout the life of the series, you’d think we’d still be getting entries every now and then, especially with EA’s uncanny ability to keep a series going well past its prime. But alas, here we are. Ten years after the last game in the series was released and not even a whisper of a new game. Why is that? What the hell happened to Fight Night?

My relation with this franchise was fnr3 for the 360 back in the launch of the console in Europe. If I remember well the game launched 1 month after the launch of the 360, and I bought it because I was impressed with the realism and graphics. I enjoyed the gameplay a lot despite only buying the game for the graphics.
 
The last game bombed like a B32 is what happened. It was also on the eve of EA requiring high sales performance for them to consider a project viable
 

Kuranghi

Member
I used to play this with my buddy and we'd try and see how many rabbit or kidney punches we could do before the ref stopped the match, couldn't you bite too? Good times just mashing kidneys.
 
probably doesn't help that boxing is such a mess. Its still crooked...and theres at least 3 major boxing feds.

better question. how on earth did Fight Night become the only backwards compatible sports game?? The reason sports games aren't BC..is obviously because of licensing. How did a boxing game, which could conceivably have even worse licensing red tape than other sports titles, skirt this?
 

sn0man

Member
probably doesn't help that boxing is such a mess. Its still crooked...and theres at least 3 major boxing feds.

better question. how on earth did Fight Night become the only backwards compatible sports game?? The reason sports games aren't BC..is obviously because of licensing. How did a boxing game, which could conceivably have even worse licensing red tape than other sports titles, skirt this?
Great post on both counts:

Boxing has a great history angle like baseball and so the different federations are full foolish short-sided idiots. If they wanted to form a league with monthly matches in one federation they could have a real credibility there. Turn the different federations into regions like a cross between NFL East/Central/West conferences and MLB’s triple A. Then every year stagger the various fights from different weight classes into a single Professional title match.

I wonder if the different fighters and federations were so split into factions that they had relatively bad negotiating power and EA demanded an ironclad license.
 

anthraticus

Banned
probably doesn't help that boxing is such a mess. Its still crooked...and theres at least 3 major boxing feds.

better question. how on earth did Fight Night become the only backwards compatible sports game?? The reason sports games aren't BC..is obviously because of licensing. How did a boxing game, which could conceivably have even worse licensing red tape than other sports titles, skirt this?
Boxing's been crooked though.

Better question is what happened to mainstream gaming.
 

Ribi

Member
E-sports boxing clubs is shaping up really well.

It is strange though because Wilder said a year and a half ago that he had spent some time doing work for the new fight night and nothing came of it.

Either way excited for

 
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