EA Sports will remain the exclusive producer and distributor of Madden NFL video games
The National Football League has inked an expanded multi-year deal with Electronic Arts and EA SPORTS to keep the video game company as the exclusive developer and distributor of the popular Madden NFL video game series. The relationship, though, will expand well beyond gaming and may mean more alternate broadcasts are down the road for the league’s broadcast partners.
A press release on the announcement says the partnership’s goal is to create “new, large-scale interactive experiences” that merge live gameplay, data, and community connection. For the sports-broadcast industry, that points squarely toward more editions of EA SPORTS Madden NFL Cast — the alternate broadcast first produced by NBC Sports and Peacock in December 2024. Or more things like it.
“EA SPORTS and the NFL have built one of the most iconic partnerships in all of sports and entertainment, and we see so much opportunity ahead to deliver for football fans everywhere,” Cam Weber, president of EA SPORTS said in the official announcement. “With more than 2 billion games of Madden NFL played each year, the global community of football fans connecting through play has never been bigger. Together with the NFL, we will continue to shape the interactive future of football – expanding Madden NFL, growing College Football, and creating new breakthrough experiences for the next generation of fans.”
The Ecosystem Expands
Beyond the gridiron of console gaming, EA SPORTS’ football ecosystem is broadening. The company plans to integrate its technology stack — including machine learning, volumetric capture, and real-world data pipelines — across both its NFL and College Football titles. It’s also using global activations to grow fandom internationally, serving as presenting sponsor of the 2025 NFL Dublin Game and NFL Experience Dublin, and launching the first-ever Madden NFL Championship Series event in Spain during the 2025 NFL Madrid Game.
From a broadcast-technology standpoint, EA SPORTS’ expanding data capabilities — combined with the league’s appetite for immersive viewing experiences — set the stage for more experimental integrations between live sports coverage and interactive entertainment.
“Madden NFL has become one of the most widely recognized and culturally relevant gaming franchises in the world,” said Renie Anderson, EVP and CRO at the NFL. “As we look to this new chapter in our partnership with EA SPORTS, our focus remains on the success of NFL simulation gameplay and providing our fans with the best entertainment and experiences around the sport they love.”
What It Means for the Industry
For production executives, Madden Cast represents a blueprint for what the next generation of alternate broadcasts could look like: a live event augmented by real-time data, video-game-style graphics, and AI-driven storytelling tools that make analytics accessible and visually dynamic.
The Madden NFL Cast format represents a novel convergence of live television and gaming engines. Co-produced by NBC Sports, Peacock, EA SPORTS, the NFL, and Genius Sports, the stream layers real-time animations, route trees, player cards, and Madden-style overlays atop a live game feed. Fueled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and Genius Sports’ GeniusIQ AI platform, the production effectively transforms a linear broadcast into an interactive, video-game-inspired experience.
The first ‘EA Sports Madden NFL Cast’ was produced by NBC Sports and streamed live on Peacock in December 2024.
The pilot episode — produced during the 2024 NFL season — showcased how Madden-style presentation elements could visualize play calls and player ratings in sync with live action. As a result, fans didn’t just watch football; they understood it, aided by live data streams and contextual graphics that connected broadcast storytelling with the feel of a console experience.
With this new agreement, EA SPORTS and the NFL are signaling that Madden Cast might not be a one-off experiment. Instead, it could become a recurring or even scalable companion presentation across future NFL broadcasts.
As sports networks and streaming platforms continue to explore alternate presentations aimed at younger, more tech-native audiences, EA SPORTS’ deepened partnership with the NFL could make gaming-powered broadcasts — once a novelty — a new industry standard.
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