EA Sports announces over 10,000 athletes have accepted NIL deal for its college football video game

More than 10,000 athletes have accepted an offer from EA Sports to have their likeness featured in its upcoming college football video game, the developer announced Monday.

EA Sports began reaching out to college football players in February to pay them to be featured in the game that’s scheduled to launch this summer.

EA Sports said players who opt in to the game will receive a minimum of $600 and a copy of EA Sports College Football 25. There will also be opportunities for them to earn money by promoting the game.

Players who opt out will be left off the game entirely and gamers will be blocked from manually adding, or creating, them, EA sports said without specifying how it plans to do that.

John Reseburg, vice president of marketing, communications and partnerships at EA Sports, tweeted that more than 11,000 athletes have been sent an offer.

The developer has said all 134 FBS schools will be in the game.

EA Sports’ yearly college football games stopped being made in 2013 amid lawsuits over using players’ likeness without compensation. The games featured players that might not have had real-life names, but resembled that season’s stars in almost every other way.

That major hurdle was alleviated with the approval of NIL deals for college athletes.

EA Sports has been working on its new game since at least 2021, when it announced it would pay players to be featured in it.