Last month, EA Sports unveiled its Stanley Cup predictions. At the time, they proposed something that seemed crazy, that the Nashville Predators would win the Stanley Cup. With the Stanley Cup Finals starting next week- Nashville vs. Pittsburgh- this prediction doesn’t seem so outlandish anymore!
Last year I document how EA had a pretty poor track record of late in predicting the NHL playoffs. Here’s how things look today:
As you can see, there are 2 blocks where predictions are way off:
- NHL 08 and NHL 09
- NHL 14 and NHL 15
What happened here?
Let’s take a look now at these games in the broader console context:
- NHL 08: Last of series on PS2/Xbox generation
- NHL 09: First of series exclusively on PS3/Xbox 360 generation
- NHL 14: Last of series on PS3/Xbox 360 generation
- NHL 15: First of series exclusively on PS4/Xbox One generation
For whatever reason, EA seems to have trouble migrating the NHL series from one console generation to the next. This may also be a corner EA is willing to cut because, as we saw with the NBA series, as long as EA does not publish a string of bad games (thus opening the door to a competitor) consumers will remain loyal. So one off-year is an acceptable risk to take in the sports console gaming world.
So come the PS5 and Microsoft’s Project Scorpio, we can likely expect this cycle to repeat. So be weary of NHL 18! haha
MBA Video Gamer 