EA It’s been eight years since the last entry in EA’s popular Fight Night franchise was released, but boxing promoter Eddier Hearn has now claimed the beloved series could be all set to make a comeback soon.
The last game in the series, Fight Night Champions, was released in 2011. Soon after EA decided to shift its focus to UFC. It’s never been entirely clear why the publisher made this decision, but it most likely had something to do with lagging sales.
EA With UFC proving to be a more popular sport, it made sense for the company to invest in something new, although the UFC titles haven’t been quite as well received as the games in the Fight Night series (at least critically, if not commercially).
We’ve got some pretty good news for boxing fans though, as according to Hearn, EA is currently looking into bringing the franchise back for another round. In an interview with Thaboxingvoice, the promoter revealed that he’s actually written to EA Sports to ask about the future of the franchise.
Incredibly, the developers actually got back to him and revealed that they were looking into it:
Every time I tweet about it [Fight Night], it goes crazy! I wrote to EA Sports, ‘Do you realise how many questions I get about Fight Night games – let me bring it back?’
[They respond with] ‘Oh, we’re looking at it, we’re looking at it.’ So, EA Sports, if you’re watching, or any big-game developer, we’re here. Fight Night, let’s go. It’s going to be number one!
There’s every chance that EA’s response was nothing more than a polite reply designed to tell Hearn what he clearly wanted to hear (the guy could probably live without being asked about Fight Night constantly). On the other hand, if there’s even a kernel of truth to what EA told Hearn, then the Fight Night comeback fans have been waiting for could soon become a reality, and that’s terribly exciting.
With EA’s newfound commitment to delivering narrative experiences in their sport games (such as FIFA’s The Journey mode) a new Fight Night that allows us to play through a classic underdog boxing story would be surefire hit.
For now we can only wait and hope, but it looks like Fight Night isn’t out for the count just yet.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.