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College football players can begin to opt in to EA Sports College Football 25 starting Thursday, the gaming company announced. The video game is slated to be available this summer.
Front Office Sports confirmed the terms of the deal: College football players can opt in to the deal—if they’re chosen by EA, they’ll get $600, a free version of the game, and the chance to make more money from other EA Sports name, image, and likeness deals. They will not receive outside royalties, however.
The game will include up to 85 football players per school, and athletes from other sports will also be able to get paid for promotional work, ESPN reported. The video game is slated to drop this summer.
The game would keep players for their whole career (including transferring, as long as they stay on a roster) and get paid annually, unless they choose to opt out, per ESPN.
The announcement comes after nearly a decade without college sports video games. The 2014 lawsuit brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon challenging EA’s use of his NIL without compensation in its college basketball video game helped spark the NIL movement. In some ways, EA is the most high-profile product in the new NIL era because it was the center of what led to NIL in the first place.
These deals are typically negotiated with a union rather than individual players, creating a tumultuous process for EA. An NIL group licensing company filed a lawsuit against EA over that issue in June, claiming EA was going around its agreements with schools to work with athletes directly, before dropping it in December. OneTeam Partners negotiated the deal on behalf of athletes in this case.
