Can We Ever Go Back to the Way Sports Games Were Made Before?

One thing I can do right now as we await the true “blitz” of sports game news to pick back up closer to summer is get to some of the mailbag questions people have asked me on Discord and elsewhere in the months prior (feel free to ask them to me any time in the #mailbag area of the Discord as well).

A question I’ve been meaning to get to for months comes from OSer studbucket, and he essentially asked if there’s any way a non-predatory sports game (see: single-player focused with no microtransactions) with critical buzz could ever light the world on fire like a Baldur’s Gate or Clair Obscur has done in the last couple years.

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In other words, could a game that is ultimately top tier in many ways surprise some folks or come from a place you might not expect. Could someone other than SDS, EA, or 2K make a sports game that shocks, impresses, and sells tons of copies while breaking out of the mold of only appealing to sports fans?

In short, could a sports game give us an RKO-outta-nowhere in 2026 and beyond?

To answer that question, I think you need to do two things first. One, we have to define what a “Clair Obscur” sort of success story would be in 2026. I don’t think it’s garner “game of the year” votes from traditional outlets because I don’t think sports games ever were in that category. Forza or another racing game might sneak some votes here and there, but a yearly game generally doesn’t enter that conversation.

However, I do think this sports game would need to be a critical darling, and it would need to be pointed to as something that people say really helps invigorate the genre in one way or another.

Because if we look back, that’s really what a lot of the “best” sports games have done through the eras. If we look way back to the SNES/Genesis era, things like NBA Jam, NHL 94, and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball were hailed as games that were the best at their sport and appealed to anyone and everyone.

Alternatively, as much as we adore things like NFL 2K4 or Madden 2005, even those I would say were built with fans of those sports and franchises in mind even before the “broader” audience was considered. Things like WWF No Mercy or NFL Blitz are slightly different in that they go beyond only hooking fans of those things and reach an even wider audience.

I don’t think this means “simulations” could never have that same broad appeal, but I do think at some point there was a cutoff line where you could no longer “trick” someone into playing a “sim” game anymore.

For example, I can still get my non-golf-loving friends to play Super Battle Golf, but I can’t get them to play PGA 2K under any circumstance.

The second part of this equation is something like Clair Obscur added a deep “parry” component to an RPG, and that was its big gameplay hook beyond being a great story game. But the broader point with that is it was trying to be unique within the genre in some way.

Sports games used to do that far more often as well. A lot of them missed — Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is one of many to fail — but the point was you’d also get a Mutant League that brought the goodness.

Point being, sports games were not confined to the one mega release a year (your NBA 2Ks, Maddens, EA FCs), there was more diversity out there, and official licensing was not always mandatory.

So with those two things in mind, I think we can now jump in and answer this question by running through the “types” sports games that used to be made, and whether they could still be made today.

Let’s jump into the categories.

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