How much is 500 dollars?
The obvious answer is "well, it's 500 of one dollar", but what I'm actually asking is how contextual are we willing to get over a wad of cash sufficient to fund, say, 3-4 trips to Five Guys, or 15% of the cheapest Yamaha jetski?
Does Marvin Harrison, Junior deserve more than 500 dollars for someone to scan his face, upload it to whatever evil algorithm that spits out EA video games, and have millions of people play him? What about Alec DelSignore? Or you?
Because EA Sports is reportedly betting that for college football players, 500 dollars is such a large amount of dollars that there's no way that both the Alec DelSignores and Marvin Harrison, Juniors of the world won't both be equally satisfied by five crisp bills with Benjamin Franklin's face on them:
There’s a new twist in the name, image likeness era as college football players for the first time will be featured in the new EA Sports video game in 2024.
OneTeam Partners, which facilitates group licensing deals with college athletes, has signed a licensing deal with EA Sports that features a $5 million pool for roughly 10,000 eligible FBS players that will pay $500 to each player who opts into the agreement. The payout is a pre-set fee with no royalties, according to multiple sources, with no room to negotiate for additional cash. It doesn’t matter if the football player is a backup safety at Clemson or a star running back at Troy University.
I've seen a lot of back-of-the-napkin math done in the debate about this, mostly centered around the amount of money that NFL players make from their likenesses in EA's Madden franchise (estimated by one self-interested guy to be between $17 and $28k, but frankly who really knows) versus the number of FBS athletes, which would necessitate EA Sports paying many additional orders of magnitude to college football players for a comparable amount, which still pales in the face of EA's billions of dollars of revenue from Ultimate Team alone, which blah blah blah blah.
Debating this minutiae isn't interesting to me because it sidesteps the primary issue of whether the players themselves think that 500 dollars is an acceptable amount of dollars for someone to use your likeness in a multibillion dollar franchise. Frankly I think you'd have to be crazy to take that amount of money for someone to have rights over your face, (especially if you're a nascent superstar like Marvin Harrison, Junior), and it's funny to me that 500 bucks seems to be the amount that people with power have decided The Youths are impressed by. Troy Smith got busted for allegedly taking 500 bucks from a booster in 2004, and EA isn't even going to give current athletes the benefit of inflation? That's 800 2023 dollars!
The second part of this debate that I find irritating is the argument that players should be "thrilled" to be in a video game, and therefore happy with whatever compensation that they get for essentially doing nothing but having a face.
This of course ignores the possibility that 19 year old football players who were in 3rd grade when the last college football game came out might not have the same attachment to the series that Millennials pushing 40 have, but it also ignores the difficulty of getting to the point to which you'd get paid for your mug. If someone offered me 500 dollars for the rights to what I look like, I'd be more suspicious than anything because I'm a doughy 38 year old man with no discernable physical talent. 12 bucks and some change is probably a decent going rate for a sloppy dad bod.
But if I were an elite 20-year old athlete loved by millions, it's not unreasonable to think 500 dollars is kind of insulting, maybe? Or maybe it's fine, I don't know; it's not something I've ever been. Ultimately it's up to the athletes themselves to decide what's appropriate, so while there might be some gnashing of teeth from gamers about holding up a reskinned version of a game that they already play, I think that given the money potentially involved here it'd probably be okay if there was some way for this to be a negotiation rather than a handout.
But that's just for a single college football video game! There's a whole world of electronic entertainment, and if college football players are going to get lowballed in this video game, they might as well get lowballed in a lot of video games to make up the difference. Such as:
- Every time someone names their new filly "Kyle McCord" in Horse Club Adventures, he gets $50 and a voucher for a week of free riding lessons
- Emeka Egbuka replaces the eponymous Knack in the inevitable Knack III (now known as Egbuka III), providing the character model and recording all of his classic lines, like "Knack is back" and "Ice is nice". He is paid in copies of Knack II, sure to appreciate in value
- Miyan Williams is now the voice of the warning that tells people to take an eye break if they've been playing games too long. He gets paid via the satisfaction he gets from informing people about vision health
- Marvin Harrison, Junior is in the new college football game from EA Sports. He got paid $10,000. Alec DelSignore also got $10,000
Maybe all of that is only possible in a world in which players have representation and agency that they are only now starting to attain, and maybe EA knows that world is approaching very quickly.
If that's the case, and if that's something that might endanger the possibility of future college football video games, it might be a good idea to ask the players how much they want instead of telling them how much they're going to get.
