Fight Night Round 5, or some manner of reboot for the boxing sim, is reportedly coming and it may have been confirmed by one of the star boxers attached to it.
Boxing video games used to come out fairly regularly. In the early 1990s, every major entity in boxing from Muhammad Ali to Evander Holyfield to Wide World of Sports had its own video game. It didn’t stop there, either. Boxing games came out regularly into the 2000s with everything from Rocky to Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing.
EA Sports’ Fight Night series wound up cementing itself as the definitive boxing sim, alongside the publisher’s other efforts. Though the series enjoyed strong critical success, EA entering into a partnership with the UFC seemingly saw the series end after Fight Night Champion in 2011. But after 13 years of relative quiet, there are suggestions that Fight Night might be revived.
Will there be a Fight Night Round 5?
Multiple prominent boxers have suggested that a new Fight Night game is in development.
On April 9, WBA featherweight champion Raymond Ford posted an Instagram Story showing a tweet claiming that a new Fight Night game is set to be released in 2024. This was preceded in February by Oscar De La Hoya saying on Twitter that there was a “huge announcement soon” regarding video games. The tweet included an image of Fight Night Round 3, leading to speculation that the announcement was related to a new game in the series.
EA Sports has not confirmed a new boxing game, but the Fight Night series has reportedly been on the shelf rather than canceled. VGC reported in 2021 that leadership at EA Canada, which was later renamed EA Vancouver, sent an email to staff that stated it was pausing the franchise to focus on EA Sports UFC 5 for the “foreseeable future.” EA Sports UFC 5 launched on October 27, 2023, which may have allowed the studio to turn its attention to boxing.
Which boxers could appear in a new Fight Night game?
Oscar De La Hoya and Raymond Ford are among the boxers who have made social media posts related to a potential new Fight Night game. Beyond that, it’s unclear who else could be included in the game.
Fight Night Champion boasted a roster of over 50 real-life boxers including both legendary figures and top stars of the day. Its roster was far from comprehensive however and lacked several top boxers of the era, most notably Floyd Mayweather. Fans undoubtedly hope that a potential Fight Night Round 5 has even more.
Though it’s never been confirmed, many have theorized that the cost and difficulty of licensing boxers was a factor in EA prioritizing UFC games, where one promotion owns all the image rights of its competitors and doesn’t pay them anything for it, over Fight Night. EA has historically leveraged those sorts of exclusive image rights to maintain dominance over the sports game genre, something seen with how difficult it is for a company like 2K to hypothetically enter the realm of soccer.
Those difficulties remain and it’s unclear how many or which boxers could be included in the game.
