Electronic Arts brings ‘Madden’ to Facebook

Electronic Arts is bringing its popular “Madden” football game to Facebook. “Madden NFL Superstars” launches as a free application Tuesday.

The game lets players create fantasy teams featuring more than 1,500 current NFL players from this year’s team rosters. The fantasy teams compete with one another on Facebook. Or, they can play against fantasy versions of the season’s actual NFL teams.

Electronic Arts Inc. plans to make money from the game by letting players pay nominal amounts of money for better players and other game content. Those microtransactions are expected to add up, though the majority of players are expected to play the game without paying a dime.

“NFL Superstars,” which comes a week before the football season kicks off, follows EA‘s “FIFA Superstars” soccer game for Facebook. That game has about 4 million players.

EA Sports President Peter Moore said the idea is to bring “Madden” to a broader audience beyond the fans of the console version, which sells about 5 million to 6 million units each year and can be complicated to play.

“NFL Superstars” was created by EA Sports and Playfish, the social game company EA bought last year for $275 million.

[Associated Press]

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Charles

Charles is the Founder and Editor In Chief of thegamefanatics.com and even though he didn’t grow up with the opportunity to have as many systems as probably a lot of hardcore gamers did, he always had an avid passion for gaming. He currently does most of his gaming on either the ps3 or pc, and gets irked when people try to discredit the pc as a viable gaming console. He does have a life outside of video games; playing the drums and acoustic guitar as well as playing basketball and football are some of his hobbies. He says the only thing he love more than gaming is being around a community of gamers. Email him, find him on twitter, or stalk him on facebook!