EA fields MLB Facebook game

Games.com.

According to reports, it's the company's first baseball game in six years thanks to Take-Two Interactive owning the rights to Major League Baseball (MLB)-based games since 2005.

The game is developed by EA's Playfish division, which previously took advantage of EA's licensing deals to create social games based on the publisher's popular Madden and Fifa franchises, writes Gamasutra.

Madden NFL Superstars and Fifa Superstars have 1.5 million and 3.5 million monthly users respectively on Facebook.

Rival publisher Take-Two has had an exclusive third-party licensing contract with the MLB since 2005 - expiring at the end of the 2012 season - but that agreement did not cover games released on Facebook. EA evidently took advantage of that loophole to work out this deal with the MLB.

According to All Things Digital, the president of EA Sports, Peter Moore, says the company is back in baseball. “It's been six years since we've had the licences.”

For a while now, MLB has had a third-party exclusivity with EA's competitor, Take-Two Interactive. While Take-Two still holds a grip on most games, MLB has turned to EA to make its Facebook game.

This may be an early indication that EA's decision to fork out $275 million to acquire Playfish, one of the early entrants into the social-gaming space, was a step in the right direction.