2K Is Building a Football Studio in EA's Backyard - and It's About Time

Every autumn the same ritual plays out in our region: a new EA Sports FC arrives, everyone grumbles that it's last year's game with fresh kits, and everyone buys it anyway - because if you want to play football with your mates, there's exactly one shop in town. This week, for the first time in years, someone serious moved to open a second one.

2K has announced a new studio called Small Axe, and the details read like a declaration of intent. It sits in Vancouver, the same city where EA builds the FC series. It's led by Aaron McHardy, a man who spent 17 years at EA working on sports games - most of that on FIFA, where he rose to executive producer. And its official mandate is to create 2K's "next blockbuster sports franchise". Nobody has said the word "football" out loud, but a club-crest logo and a staff list full of FIFA veterans aren't exactly subtle hints.

What a monopoly actually costs

Since Konami turned PES into the free-to-play eFootball and quietly left the pitch, EA has had the football sim market essentially to itself. You can see the result on the product: annual releases with modest changes, a full price tag every year, and Ultimate Team sitting at the centre of everything as the real business. That's not EA being uniquely evil - it's what any company does when the customer has nowhere else to go. The FIFA vs PES years, when both games had to fight for the same players, produced the best versions of both. Competition works. We've just forgotten what it looks like in this genre.

Before anyone starts celebrating a consumer revolution, two cold showers. First, 2K is the publisher of NBA 2K, whose virtual currency economy is nobody's idea of player-friendly - if Small Axe wins, it won't be because 2K dislikes microtransactions. Second, a brand-new sports franchise built from scratch is years away, and licences - leagues, clubs, players' faces - are a moat EA spent decades digging. Reports about football licensing talks are floating around, but nothing there is confirmed, so I wouldn't build hopes on rumours.

And yet I'll take it, gladly. In a market like ours, where a full-price game is a real chunk of a monthly budget, even the credible threat of an alternative is worth something: it's the only language that reliably makes a monopolist improve the product or think twice about the price. The studio's name, Small Axe, isn't shy about the plan. There's a very big tree in Vancouver, and someone finally started swinging.

Image: Richard Humphrey / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floodlight_match_at_Sincil_Bank_Stadium,_home_of_Lincoln_City_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6358501.jpg