Aaron Judge Cover Reveal Can't Stop Onset of Gamer Depression for MLB The Show 26 Fans

Stop me if you’ve heard this before — don’t actually — but SDS bummed a bunch of folks out with the FAQ they released alongside their cover athlete this year.

Aaron Judge returns to the cover for MLB The Show 26 after last being on it with MLB The Show 18 (which had some pretty bad gameplay in retrospect), but the FAQ that SDS always releases alongside the cover news served as a gut punch once again.

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When I talked about building the “perfect” MLB The Show 26 franchise mode on a budget, most of the top choices were things that people have clamored for year after year. It’s a mix of old features being returned to us or new platforms being added.

In short, people want The Show on PC, and they want carryover saves and rosters to return. As the FAQ revealed, none of that is happening once again.

There will be no Nintendo Switch 2 version and no PC version. There will be no carryover saves for rosters or franchises — or stadiums. There will be no Tech Test. There will be no physical collector’s edition.

A lot of this is unsurprising because it’s been the same story for years now. It’s a frustration with what once was no longer being available, on top of other stuff slowly sliding through our fingers.

The stadium vault not having carryover saves did get some context at the very least:

If the stadiums really aren’t carrying over only because they couldn’t properly tag the ones that should be in competitive or not, that’s not going to fly either. And by “not gonna fly” I mean people are not going to be eager to do work all over again if they don’t get some benefits out of it beyond allowing “comp” players to use stadiums online.

At the very least, the stadium creator needs to have some quality of life improvements added to it — and boy do I hope search works better now as well.

The Show also got a release date, March 17. Early access starts on March 13, and the feature they chose to hype up for now is that the WBC tourney will be in Diamond Dynasty.

With the WBC only being in DD, it would be easy to be unhappy with that as well, but I will give them some leeway there. Not only do I think there’s some licensing issues around the tourney itself because Konami recently had it in its Power Pros game (and thus might have some sort of exclusivity), but tons of the players are not in the MLBPA either.

Confining the WBC to DD at least allows SDS to put together small rosters of real players in one mode — and then that mode expires when the next year rolls around so they can avoid longer term licensing problems, which would become an issue if they had them in an offline mode that lasted forever. That said, maybe there will be some limited RttS implementation as well.

On top of that, we also know that Fresno State is in the game now (where Judge went to school), which means there’s at least one more college team in Road to the Show.

For now, it was hardly an exciting reveal for many folks, and as usual the FAQ mostly just hurt the hype — even if I approve of SDS not beating around the bush each year.

SDS will have another chance to impress when the gameplay trailer drops next week.

Other News From This Past Week

Football season is coming to a close soon, so we’re getting into final roster update territory. National champion, odds-on favorite for the top pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, and the king of the polished-but-never-say-much-of-anything interview himself Fernando Mendoza got bumped to a 99 overall in what will presumably be the final roster update for CFB 26.

Madden 26 also got its Super Bowl roster update last night. As expected, a bunch of players on the Super Bowl teams got some ratings bumps.

The NBA season is closing in on its All-Star festivities in mid-February, and with the announcements about All-Star Weekend beginning to come out, 2K released a roster update. NBA 2K26 is also the second-best selling game of the year, according to Circana.

I skipped the news last week while handing over Friday’s newsletter to Kevin, but I do want to point out that Forza Horizon 6 did unveil its first gameplay teaser last week

Microsoft needs Horizon 6 to be a big hit like Horizon 5 was because the news continued to be “meh” for the games division in the latest Microsoft earnings results. Their hardware sales are down once again, and overall Xbox hardware sales are down over 30% year-on-year.

But let’s not end on a downer. Instead, there’s some good news this week as Undisputed will be hitting PlayStation Plus in February. On top of that, there appears to be a sick new climbing game out: Cairn.

We have our official OS review up, and as someone who played one of the demos for this game months back, I’m not shocked to see it getting glowing reviews from all over the place.

I will absolutely be checking out the full release when I get a chance, and it feels long overdue that we get some more rock climbing games in our lives.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase