Nick Channon, senior producer at EA Canada, talks about women in FIFA 16.
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Why EA added women’s soccer teams to the upcoming FIFA 16

Electronic Arts has made a big decision to add women’s soccer teams to FIFA 16 coming this September. That may seem like a no-brainer for attracting women and girls to FIFA’s worldwide fan base, but it wasn’t easy to do.

Women’s soccer is becoming more popular in the U.S., and it stands to reason that EA Sports’ FIFA, the world’s most lucrative sports video game franchise, stands to benefit from that. I talked with Nick Channon, the senior producer on FIFA 16 at EA Canada in Vancouver, about the change. He said that EA had to change the physics and character models in the game in order to accurately depict women in a realistic way on the pitch.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.