Recently, things have been busy for EA Sports franchise and their partnership with FIFA. Early this month, it became official; EA decided to not renew their contract with FIFA, introducing the new EA Sports FC. This means EA Sports will have to strip any branding of FIFA within their game. While EA seems optimistic about the change, it does mean the company can no longer tout its 28-year-long tradition of authenticity.
Both companies believe their respective IP can achieve the same level of success on their own. Under the EA Sports FIFA banner, the franchises dominated the genre. If you look how accessible this content is, they game reached a stage where you can even place bets on eSports FIFA events. If this is something you’re interested in then take a look at the latest odds and fixtures at Odds Index.
However, all this will not affect the upcoming release of FIFA 23. Instead, next year’s game will be the last before the game is rebranded.
What fans want to know is does this have any affect towards the 2022 World Cup and will it still be included in FIFA 23?
FIFA 23 Will Go Ahead With The World Cup 2022
Normally, the World Cup would take place in the summer, meaning it will be included in the game title that reflects that year, eg. FIFA 22 inc. World Cup 2022. EA Sports remained strategic in planning and releases, ensuring fans enjoyed and used all of the features the standard game had to offer, before then releasing the World Cup version shortly before the competition began in real time.
Due to the World Cup 2022 being in Qatar and having to start in November, EA seemingly will not be able to do what they normally would. FIFA 23 is planned to be released in October 2022, that’s only a month prior to when the World Cup will begin, meaning players will not have had much time experiencing the other game modes featured. Nevertheless, they feel this game mode is too popular to not include and many fans will be expecting it to be included. Aware its popularity, EA Sports confirmed despite it not being at an ideal time, it will include the World Cup feature.
What will be included
As of yet, nothing is finalized; however, rumors speculate some issues with what can and can’t be included in this year’s World Cup FIFA edition. It may have an impact on the overall experience of it, making it a bit of an anticlimax in comparison to recent versions, where EA Sports really spoiled us.
Due to the licensing issues, it means that less than half of the qualified teams were included in FIFA 22. Teams such as Qatar, Croatia, Serbia, Iran, South Korea, Japan, All African teams, and more were not usable on the current EA Sports title. However, this is not to say that will be the case for FIFA 23 and their World Cup edition. It may be the case that they work something else and work on creating a license which allows them to use the names of these teams that are currently not featured on FIFA 22, especially when some of these teams have been featured on older editions of FIFA.
Looking back to Russia 2018
The last World Cup content on FIFA was Russia 2018. Thankfully, saving some money for the many players of this thriving game, EA Sports were kind enough to add a DLC (downloadable content) to the current edition of FIFA, which was also free. This meant it was so easy to access the World Cup platform. It was released a few weeks prior to the World Cup. It included all of the teams and 12 of the chosen stadiums. This is exactly what we expect to see in FIFA 23 and we hope there to be no licensing issues or the recent contract closures to stand in the way.
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I absolutely love the FIFA series of games and hope FIFA 23 will arrive soon, I can’t wait to play it.