MLB The Show to PC Rumors Alive and Well

During a week of wishcasting by me, SDS apparently heard me groveling and put up a job application for a “Senior Graphics PC Programmer” that caused my heart to grow three sizes (which is bad, you don’t want an enlarged heart, I’m now on hold with my primary care physician as I write this).

MLB The Show 26 is likely set for a mid-to-late March release unless something odd happens, so this sort of job listing is a little late in the process if you’re building a game releasing in about five months. However, we need this, so let’s talk more about what it could mean.

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After the debacle with the PS3’s architecture and difficulty to develop for it, Sony did mostly decide to start playing by the rules of modern gaming with the PS4 and beyond by creating development kits and consoles that were easier for developers to handle. In today’s world, most games are ultimately “made” on PC even if they’re for console because the architecture is similar enough.

With that said, let’s look at a portion of the job description:

Job descriptions aren’t going to always tell the whole story (or be entirely accurate), but explicitly writing “come join San Diego Studio making a AAA PC title” is cut and dry. SDS only makes MLB The Show. There was a time it did other stuff and helped with ports, but it’s the baseball studio at this point. It also probably means this isn’t for some college baseball game or anything like that either. This is most likely MLB related.

This doesn’t mean SDS couldn’t be doing something else in secret, but considering there’s not oodles of job listings, this strikes me as adding to a current team to help with an ongoing project.

Beyond that, the thing about any of this is you don’t need a “full” PC team to make a PC port at this point. Again, the architecture is at least in the same ballpark so you just need enough experts to help with optimization and making the game run right on PC versus the console editions.

PlayStation has also been more and more aggressive bringing its biggest PlayStation games to PC, and while it hasn’t tended to be “day and date” on PC with other releases, The Show is among PlayStation’s biggest titles considering its yearly nature and microtransactions.

A Potential Game Changer

It has been 20 years since MVP Baseball 2005 hit PC, and PC gamers have been keeping the dream alive with mods for that game, but there hasn’t been much since then in terms of MLB products to hit PCs.

MLB 2K12 was the last bastion of baseball on that platform, so we’re going on 13 years without a “true” PC MLB game that isn’t OOTP. Among the major pro sports, only NHL fans know a worse pain as NHL 09 is the last one to hit PC (college fans have even more of a gripe, obviously).

For me, the pain of not having a PC game started to hit even harder this year after importing Pro Yakyuu Spirits.

It gave me the first taste of something fresh and still current-gen in many years, and so it just hit different. The graphics, the gameplay, the features, the rosters all provided me with something I did not realize I had been missing.

Even if a potential MLB The Show game on PC didn’t revolutionize the graphics, just having some amount of modding capabilities built into it would breathe so much new life into the series. The stadium creator would likely come back alive in a big way, and even if we didn’t get year-to-year saves back, the ability create rosters and potentially even franchise files that could be more easily shared among the PC users would be such a massive lift for the series.

I have been dabbling a bit with MLB The Show the past couple weeks with the Postseason going on, and as always I don’t find anything truly “wrong” with the inning-to-inning action, I just don’t stick with it like I used to. Franchise mode is still outdated, and without that ability to really go crazy with customization, this means there are only so many things I can even do within franchise mode anyway.

As someone who has fully embraced stuff like Madden and NBA 2K on PC as the “true” place to do franchise mode playthroughs, baseball games are made to be on PC. The vast amount of history, the depth of rosters, and many other aspects of baseball itself just make sense on PC. And even if the modding tools are restrictive because maybe the MLB is weird about how its game is customized, any amount of modding is better than no amount of modding.

Show fans have been searching for new reasons to get excited — or at least stay excited — about the series in recent years, and nothing would really provide as much positive good vibes as creating a PC game (short of the return of some classic old features). Whether this could be a precursor to getting stuff like Sounds of the Show back would be anyone’s guess, but the point is the buzz would be back for the series.

I’m not entirely sure if this job listing means we’re getting The Show on PC — at least not this year based on the timing of the job listing — but after getting a little burned by the fake out of CFB potentially coming to PCs, I’ll try not to get too excited just yet. However, I can’t deny that The Show on PC is now all I’ll be thinking about until MLB The Show 26 is announced.

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

-Chase