ABSTRACT
The current market for franchise-based sports videogames featuring professional sports stars and teams is linked in multiple, important ways to the broader mediated consumption of sports. Women's sports are said to be no different from men's sports in this regard, in that they must demonstrate evidence of or potential for a market—usually meaning a sustained, heavy television viewership—before they can appear as licensed, serialized videogame titles. So if such television viewership were achieved and maintained over time, the result should logically be the development of corresponding franchise-based videogames. As EA Sports executive Peter Moore explains, the company must look at factors such as market size and how many fans have indicated they would play the game, since “we're not in the business of doing the sport just because we like it, we're in the business of creating capital” (Sheffield, 2010).
