Why are the quarters 4 minutes long in ranked games?
In talking to the community and looking at the logs last year, many games of Madden NFL 2004 were lasting anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour. Many people felt this was too long, especially if you played against a quitter and had to complete your game against the CPU. In an effort to speed up the play, we switched to 4-minute quarters for all ranked games. In our testing, this reduced average game time by more than 10 minutes, and in some cases more than 20. Our goal was to create a fun, faster experience for all our customers.
