How many lessons is it possible to learn from a game one no longer plays? A few months back, in this very space, I used EA Sports’ Madden NFL series to argue that videogame developers need to radically rethink their doctrinaire approaches to challenge, progression and reward. But why is Madden so hard to learn?

Even more befuddling, why is it so difficult to get back into after a long layoff? After all, while the actual game of football is fairly complicated, it doesn’t change much from season to season. But therein, perhaps, lies the key to why EA’s signature American sports series is so inaccessible. At Ziff-Davis’ recent Electronic Gaming Summit, EA Sports president Peter Moore gave a presentation entitled ‘EA Sports: How Are We Going to Stay In the Game?’ During his talk, he put up a slide displaying his division’s key tenets:

• Capturing our CORE with breakthrough innovation
• Expanding our BRAND with Wii exclusive experiences
• Captivating the MASSES with the new EA Sports Freestyle launch

Again, why is breakthrough innovation necessary in a sport that is largely the same year after year? It’s because EA is trying to convince you to buy the same game year after year. Without these innovations, they’d have to persuade you to spend $60 for roster updates and new box art, which is a tough sell. As a result, Madden NFL 2009 will boast several feature innovations, followed by Madden NFL 2010, followed by Madden NFL 2011, and so on. And while some of these will be pulled from subsequent versions, many will remain intact. So what is the net effect of innovation stacked upon innovation upon innovation? Complexity.

In other words, EA Sports is a prisoner of its business model, a phenomenon that I call the tyranny of the $60 game. Even though Madden NFL is an extremely successful franchise, the barrier to entry (and re-entry) is inadvertently and artificially nudged higher every year in order to push you into buying it. And resistance is futile because of the network effect; if you opt out of the latest version while your friends cave in and buy it, you’re cut off from playing with them.

During the Q&A portion of Moore’s session, I asked him how he intended to tackle the compounding difficulty of EA Sports titles; he answered that each of his studios planned to incorporate both adaptive AI and a mentoring system into their games. But I’m skeptical that either one is anything more than a Band-Aid that doesn’t really address the root cause.

So if the EA Sports business model is pushing the development team in the wrong direction, why not change the business model for Madden NFL from a $60 disc to a $40 disc or download with a $2 monthly subscription? Or give the base game away for free, but with a $5 monthly subscription? I’m sure EA’s number crunchers will crunch the numbers, then tell me why I’m full of it – and they might be right on the financials, to say nothing of the risk. But my point is that by switching to a monthly subscription model, EA Sports’ relationship to its customer will change to one that no longer requires large-scale annual innovations that make the game more complex. Instead, the Madden team can focus on making smaller, more evolutionary changes to the service around the core gameplay; building a strong social network to take advantage of the fact that so many people buy the title; and moving more radical changes to a longer cycle.

Another publisher that ought to explore these possibilities is Activision with its Call Of Duty franchise. The most recent game in the series, Infinity Ward’s Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, moving it into the top ranks of videogame IPs. So far, there’s been one map pack released, but from conversations I’ve had with people close to Activision it’s not clear how much longer the publisher and the developer will support COD4 with DLC after World At War ships. This makes no sense for a game that has effectively become Counter-Strike for consoles – especially given that COD4 is set in modern times, while the forthcoming game takes place during World War II.

If Activision and Infinity Ward were to think of COD4’s online following as a community rather than as an audience, it would likely send them in a direction that’s closer to what Valve is doing with Team Fortress 2’s regular flow of content updates – each of which only adds to the perceived value of the base game – rather than what EA Sports is currently doing with Madden. While I have no doubt that some COD4 players will at least temporarily decamp for the new title, the sheer size of COD4’s playerbase almost guarantees that its community will remain active for a long time, and it deserves to be taken care of until the next Modern Warfare ships, at the very least. It’s high time that the tyranny of the $60 boxed product was overthrown. Who will be the next to rebel?

N’Gai Croal writes about technology for Newsweek