Bad news for gamers who enjoy college basketball: no more College Hoops 2K. Earlier this morning Kotaku posted a rumor that College Hoops would be canceled due to licensing talks falling through, and after following up Take-Two confirmed that it was true.
What’s the reason? Right now, it looks like the Collegiate Licensing Company wanted more for the continued use of the license than Take-Two was willing to spend. In their email, Take-Two stated, "…given our disciplined approach to the business, we do not believe the current discussions would result in an acceptable outcome."
Will EA look to gobble up another exclusive sports franchise? Possibly. If you don’t follow sports videogame news very often, you may have missed EA deciding to not renew their college baseball license, leaving Take-Two with the sole baseball game this year after scoring exclusive MLB rights.
Those same MLB rights may also be the biggest culprit in Take-Two’s decision to not renew the college hoops license. On Gamasutra, Cowan analyst Dough Creutz wrote that Take-Two will hit their intended gross margin target as they move to more non-licensed games.
"The most significant portion of Take-Two’s licensing costs is its exclusive contract with Major League Baseball," he explains. "This is evident from the jump in licensing costs from $6.3MM in FY05 (the last year of the non-exclusive contract) to $52.8MM in FY06 (the first year of the exclusive contract)."
With Take-Two paying that much more due to the MLB license alone and their sports division taking a hit due to the poor performance of All-Pro Football 2K8, it would make sense for their number crunchers to not renew the NCAA basketball license if the CLC was asking for too much. Unfortunately for us, that means next year we’re (likely) going to be stuck with March Madness.
