>>717558002
>But no, if your football game doesn't have the NFL license it's doa so devs don't even bother.
This was kind of solved eons ago in the football (soccer) sphere: unofficial logo packs and databases. They're completely free and fan-made, you just have to ship your game in a way such extras work out-of-box. Since everybody shares and installs this voluntarily not even legal departments could go after you as a dev. A couple years ago one of the true veterans of the genre, Rolf Langenberg assembled a couple old buddies who worked with him on various football manager series at EA Sports (Total Club Manager and FIFA Manager) to make a new franchise at THQ Nordic. He did that knowing that he could count on the then on-existent community to do the license work for him.

He wasn't wrong, see: https://www.fm-zocker.net/content/de/waf2024/?category253=Megapatch&downloads253=644 (the English description is down below) and https://www.moddb.com/mods/fm-zocker (screenshots). I'm not sure how applicable this is on consoles, which is obviously the weak point of this argument. The closest I've seen was modified PES games on warez sites back in the day that came with such patches installed already. Obviously they were only for hacked/modded consoles so the point hardly applies to the current generation but you get the idea. Even if it's impossible to do without the official ecosystem a PC exclusive (American) football game might still be better than nothing.