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
Naturally, we are talking about Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection Electronic Arts
While that technically also includes companies such as Stock Advisor selection Activision
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.