Moore: Sports games treated unfairly

Gamers who criticise sports titles for a lack of creativity are misguided, EA Sports president Peter Moore has said.

The business brains behind annual sports games FIFA and Madden urged critics to play upcoming boxing game Fight Night Champion.

"Sports games are often misguidedly slighted for a lack of creativity," Moore wrote in a blog post titled, Is Boxing Dead?

"Uneducated gamers will cry, 'You just update the rosters.' No doubt you've heard me vigorously defend the amount of innovation that our Tiburon and EAC studios deliver in our annual titles.

"For all of the 'haters' of the Sports genre, I urge you to check out Fight Night Champion to experience the amount of creativity and innovation we're delivering with this game when it launches on 1st March."

Moore's view forms part of a larger post about the waning popularity of boxing. While Moore admitted the sport is "challenged by declining interest", "a lack of bona fide superstars" and the "growth of mixed martial arts", "boxing's not dead".

As a result, EA Sports has produced a Fight Night game that's "more risky". It tells "the stories behind the game" and brings "the participants to life as characters, not just players".

Boxing is enjoying a resurgence, Moore insisted, and pointed to the recent success of film The Fighter and upcoming Eminem boxing movie Southpaw as evidence.

"It's been more than three decades since Martin Scorcese's masterpiece Raging Bull helped tell one of the greatest boxing stories of all time, and our development team at EAC is taking cues from some of the great boxing films to create a game experience that captures that type of drama of the sport outside of the ring.

"Why? Because we believe the sport is unique in its timeless ability to be the catalyst for great storytelling, as with so many great films over the years, and because we know this is our opportunity to do something radically new with the Fight Night franchise."

The "wow" mode in new boxing game Fight Night Champion is a story-based campaign about one man: Andre Bishop. In Champion Mode, you'll follow Bishop's hopes and dreams through fights, training and possibly cut-scenes. This will be EA Sports' first M-rated game.