This will be the third year EA Sports runs a March Madness-style vote-off for the cover of Madden NFL and on the whole, Iâve really enjoyed the first two. Itâs a fun bar argument and the promotion is well run in conjunction with ESPN. Anthony Stevenson, the gameâs chief marketer, has been forthright with me about how candidates are chosen and how theyâre signed.
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But yesterday, when EA Sports decided to conduct a âplay-inâ vote over Twitter between Jerry Rice and Cris Carter for the last of the tournamentâs 64 bids, I wanted to throw my iMac at the door. Enough of this. This isnât fun and it isnât interesting to fans. Itâs harvesting them for someoneâs social media growth report.
Thatâs why I havenât written anything about NCAA Football 14âs cover voting since Jan. 25, when they finally got around to teasing actual human cover candidates after a Facebook pep rally dragged on for more than a month. When it wraps up on Friday, this contest will have lasted 84 days. I adore the NCAA Football series but it beggars the imagination that anyone could possibly care that much about the gameâs cover starâtraditionally one of the weakest in sports video games because they canât use current college players.
Facebook polls are the worst for this sort of thing because the running total is always exposed to the user, robbing the whole process of any mystery, let alone news, that makes participating worthwhile in the first place. Right now, Denard Robinson of Michiganâwho should have been named the cover star back on Dec. 14, as the best senior from the biggest schoolâis leading Ryan Swope of Texas A&M by about 14,000 votes. Robinsonâs going to win; we donât have to run the announcement on Friday.
Maddenâs only doing this for a âplay-inâ (to determine a âlegendâ candidate taking the place of the 11-year-old Houston Texans on that half of the bracket.) MLB 13 The Show ran a Twitter campaign for its cover star though, mercifully, it lasted only a week. I hope, with Madden itâs the end of it for good, because itâs an obnoxious means of padding out a corporationâs social media presence more than it is fan service.
Weâre in the final stages of box art being a meaningful product feature because, well, where weâre going, there ainât gonna be no boxes. But it still matters in sports video gaming, where the news is received as a kind of Wheaties-box honor. Putting that in the hands of fans is fine but by now it feels like weâre voting on the individual flakes of cereal more than the guy on the front.
