CBS and Turner Broadcasting have had record ratings with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but the gaming industry is spending this March Madness on the bench. 2009 was the last time a college basketball game released, while NCAA football games release regularly; there’s a reason for that as EA’s college football games regularly sell a few million, or ten times the number that their college basketball games did.

The breakeven on a sports game is probably around 1 million units, and NCAA Football regularly exceeds this level, while NCAA Basketball regularly fell short, says Michael Pachter, video game analyst, Wedbush Morgan Securities. Electronic Arts, in particular, has made a concerted effort to eliminate games that don’t make money, and 2K Sports dropped the game when EA signed its deal with 200 colleges for NCAA Football. It appeared to me at the time that 2K decided not to participate in the escalation of rights fees, and figured EA would do the same thing with basketball.

Whereas college football is wildly popular across huge parts of the country from the months of September through January, college basketball simply doesn t have that type of popularity, says Chris Sanner, executive editor for OperationSports.com . It was also bad marketing from the game publishers who shipped their college basketball video games in the fall, which made them old by the time March Madness rolled around in the spring.

Some believe that the lack of player likenesses and names hurts sales of the game. Pachter thinks that were the NCAA’s amateur rules changed, all college games would benefit and might make college basketball games feasible again.

Source: Forbes