A court has ruled that an anti-trust law suit against alleging that they leveraged their exclusive rights to the franchise in order to illegally fix the price of the NFL series.

The suit centres around the pricing of Madden 05 and it's last competitor ESPN NFL 2K5 which debuted at 19.95 USD forcing EA to release Madden 05 at 29.95 USD.

After 2005 though secured exclusive rights to the NFL franchise from the National Football League and this allowed then to artificially raise the price of the games from 30 USD to the 50 60 USD range.

Steve Berman, lawyer for the class suit said: "We believe EA forced consumers to pay an artificial premium on Madden NFL videogames,. We intend to prove that EA could inflate prices on their titles because these exclusive licenses restrained trade and for interactive sports software."

Thanks 1UP.

By Ewan Aiton