Baseball is returning to the catalog of EA Sports after Electronic Arts’ acquisition of Super Mega Baseball developer Metalhead. Electronic Arts has a history with baseball games in its long-dead Triple Play Baseball series and its short-lived successor: MVP Baseball. In 2005, EA struck an exclusive licensing deal with the NFL (National Football League) and sports broadcasting network ESPN to boost its long-running Madden series. Following this, the MLB (Major League Baseball) made a similar arrangement with Take-Two Interactive which only let Take-Two and first-party console developers make licensed MLB games. EA’s MVP Baseball series then pivoted to college sports with games based on NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) teams and stadiums; however, MVP: NCAA Baseball only received two games and was discontinued after its 2007 simulator due to low sales.

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Since 2006, Sony San Diego Studio’s MLB: The Show has been the king of baseball games with The Show being the only licensed MLB game between 2014 and 2020. This year’s edition of The Show was the first to be published on a competitor’s platform. MLB: The Show 21 was released on the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles alongside its PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 counterparts, albeit with the Xbox versions of the game published by MLB Advanced Media alongside Sony.

According to Business Wire, Electronic Arts announced today that it would be acquiring Metalhead: the developers behind the Super Mega Baseball franchise. EA Sports will be working with Metalhead to develop and grow Super Mega Baseball as well as developing new projects for players around the world.  Scott Drader, a cofounder of Metalhead, expressed his excitement over the buyout saying that the studio is excited to use EA’s power to grow and expand their upcoming projects and to reach a larger audience under the branding of EA Sports.

The acquisition of Metalhead is only the latest move by EA in expanding the sports underneath its umbrella. EA announced in February that it’s getting back into college football, albeit without the NCAA branding this time. The publisher is teeing up a “next-gen” golfing game in EA Sports PGA Tour and a previous procurement brought the F1 racing series into the EA Sports family as well.

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While Sony’s MLB: The Show has received high praise, it’s always good for competition to enter the field, especially since sports games have a knack for only adding small tweaks year over year. In addition, Super Mega Baseball has more of an arcade feel as opposed to The Show’s straight simulation gameplay. Metalhead’s growth under EA has the potential to expand the variety in big-budget sports titles, thus bringing more players into the stadium who might want to play a casual game of baseball without going the full simulator route.

Source: Business Wire

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Josiah Byler
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Josiah Byler is a freelance news writer for Screen Rant. He graduated from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia in 2020 with a degree in journalism. Residing in the Savannah, Georgia area Josiah can be found reading or trying to place higher than silver in Overwatch’s competitive mode when not following and reporting on the news.

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