Here's a hypothetical scenario: You spend a decade regaining a lost touch. You have the best baseball video game on the market, which -- for the past couple of years -- also happens to be the best-selling baseball game on the market. And then, one day, your chief rival on this front pays to have you excluded from making any more baseball games with real Major League Baseball players.
Q: What do you do?
A: You make the first college baseball game ever.
But that's not all. You introduce streaming content from Disney's (NYSE:DIS) ESPN -- including scores and news -- via Inside Value pick Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Xbox Live. You revolutionize the way video-game baseball is played, utilizing the right analog thumbstick to swing the baseball bat with the Load and Fire system and throw the baseball with Precision Throw Control, much like you've done before in games such as Tiger Woods Golf. And then, of course, you sell the game for a measly $29.99, to make gamers forget that they have no clue who any of the numbered and fictitiously renamed players are and have little interest in college baseball altogether.
Naturally, we are talking about Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) and its new MVP 06 NCAA Baseball, which came out this week. As you'll recall, after several years of subpar baseball games, EA came back in 2004 with a brand-new series in MVP Baseball 2004, instantly taking the video-game baseball crown from Take-Two Interactive's (NASDAQ:TTWO) World Series Baseball series -- one that has lost a step in recent years. And then, last year, Take-Two signed a seven-year "exclusive" deal with Major League Baseball's Players Association, excluding other third-party developers and publishers from using MLB players in its games, starting in 2006.
While that technically also includes companies such as Stock Advisor selection Activision (NASDAQ:ATVI), THQ (NASDAQ:THQI), and Midway Games (NYSE:MWY), it really just means EA, since the first two companies don't even compete in this genre, and Midway's game is more arcade-focused in style.
So EA, determined not to let a great game go to waste, decided to go the NCAA route and try to claim a share where most other companies with shorter pockets probably wouldn't have bothered. The shame is that this will probably be the best baseball game on the market this year, but it's likely that only the most die-hard video-game baseball fans will play it.
MVP Baseball was just one of 30-plus platinum titles in EA's lineup. Furthermore, baseball doesn't rank anywhere near football (Madden and NCAA Football) or basketball (NBA Live) in terms of popularity among gamers, so EA hasn't lost much in the grand scheme. That said, if EA does somehow end up with the No. 1 baseball game this year, the company will have made something out of nothing, and that would certainly be proof of the power of EA's brand and market position.
Fool contributor Jeff Hwang owns shares of Electronic Arts and Activision. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
