NFL Sunday Ticket + Madden = $100

[DG_ThenNowForever]

According to video game site Kotaku, you can get access to all Sunday Ticket games on your PC or phone if you buy the $100 version of Madden on Amazon.com:

The cheapest way to watch a buttload of NFL games this year—all of them live—is with a copy of Madden. You don't need an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or satellite dish to do it, either. Maybe the people behind the deal can't tell you, but I can: This will work.

It bears repeating as the season approaches because I still get "wait, what?" emails, two months after writing about the original deal. It was true then, it's true today, it'll be true when the game releases at the end of the month: You buy Madden NFL 25's "Anniversary Edition" for $100, you get a code that lets you watch DirecTV's Sunday Ticket Max service on a computer or a mobile device.

That's a hundred bucks, yes (and regular edition Madden is $60). But Sunday Ticket Max is $300, and that's if you're already paying for DirecTV service and have a dish stuck on your house. With this, maybe you're not watching on your big screen (unless you can get your device to display on your big screen), but the code gives you all the Sunday afternoon NFL games (except your local team's game). Sunday Ticket Max is also the service tier that offers the Red Zone Channel, which channel surfs the league and finds any game where a team is about to score.

EA Sports went in on this with DirecTV and Amazon back in May, and so Amazon is the only place where the anniversary edition is available. Supposedly the offer is limited to 100,000 copies, but it hasn't sold out yet and 100K should be more than enough to keep selling through to the game's launch on Aug. 27.

So while this is apparently old news, it was new to me yesterday. I went and pre-ordered a copy of Madden from Amazon today. If the deal is true, it's about $6.66 to watch each of 15 games of your favorite team, assuming that they play once on NFL Network, are not your home market, and they don't have any primetime games scheduled (which is true of my Bills). Plus Madden, plus Red Zone.

I've been clamoring for an a la carte option for NFL games for years, and this is as close as I'm going to get to that for now. But for $100 and an HDMI cables, I can stream Sunday Ticket from my PC to my HDTV for the entire season. Sounds pretty good.

Has anyone else heard of this?

[MadmanLA]

I have Madden 13 on Xbox, and I saw the promotion in the game. I also have DirecTV, and it's something to consider for sure. I'm a Chargers fan living in Los Angeles, so I'm getting almost of all the Bolts games on TV, but I would to like see different games sometimes than whatever our CBS and Fox station decides. CBS locally is little better than Fox, whereas they'll usually show the best games if the Chargers aren't available, while Fox, if the Buck-Aikman game doesn't air here will get some NFC East or North matchup.

The Red Zone channel (whether it be the DirecTV or NFL Network version) is probably the most useful channel on TV.