Electronic Arts renewed its exclusivity deal with the NFL, locking in Madden as the only NFL-approved football sim for years.
EA Sports, the National Football League, and the NFL Player’s Association announced a multiyear renewal of their long-term partnership on Thursday.
Terms and length were not disclosed, but a report earlier this week in The Sporting News said the deal will last through the 2025 season, with a chance to extend to 2026.
Beyond the continuation of the Madden franchise, EA said it plans to use the licenses in different ways, including “new genres, expanded e-sports programs, arcade-style, and enhanced mobile experiences, and more, across platforms.”
The partners also say they hope to focus on international growth and pledged “design, visualization and development innovations that grow and deepen the world of Madden NFL”.
News of the renewal was expected, but pressure on EA increased after a March announcement that 2K Sports had struck a deal with the NFL to create a line of “non-simulation” games for the next few years.
2K’s games won’t compete head-to-head with Madden, but the deal opens up the possibility that EA could face a challenge to the football dominance it has held since 2004.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.