Sports Gamers Are Saving Video Games, No Big Deal

Not many “gamers” get more guff from other gamers than sports gamers, which is why I read this week’s news with such a smug look on my face.

Roughly 60 percent of people who buy games are now buying fewer than one game per year, and only 20 percent of gamers are buying one game every 3 months, according to research firm Circana’s recent survey on the state of video games.

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Mat Piscatella is my favorite game analyst out there, and he had plenty to say about this report, as well as the recent August video game sales, that were also in part propped up (as usual) by sports games.

The Switch 2 is currently saving console sales from cratering, and sports games are a bellwether helping to sustain the month-to-month video game software sales. We are the sickos who are buying multiple games a year every year — and many of them are sports games.

NBA 2K’s movement into August is a one-year salve to add on to Madden’s chunky sales totals that prop up August’s numbers each year, but the point is sports games are key to what’s happening right now.

I won’t speak for everyone who reads this newsletter, but my guess is many of you help to make up that 22 percent buying a game every 3 months, and probably the 10-14 percent buying a game once a month. Even if you’re among the 12 percent buying a game once a year, it’s likely a sports game there as well.

The Paradox Of The Yearly Release Schedule

The yearly release schedule is all we’ve ever really known as sports gamers, and even as many other games have pulled away from an annualized schedule, sports games have held strong. If you look at the sales numbers of sports games every year, it makes sense why. We continue to show up and buy games, and sports games continue to dominate the top 10 charts for software sales each month and year.

Through tariffs, console price increases, even very lukewarm years of releases (2024 was a very bad year for sports games from a critical standpoint), we just keep buying these games.

I’m not out here saying these companies are “earning” our dollars every year, but whether it’s because it’s part of our DNA at this point, or it’s just that we love sports and it’s part of the way we consume them, sports gamers don’t seem to be atrophying as a group the way a lot of others are right now.

I’ve been buying sports games with my own (allowance) money since the ‘00s and was begging for them as gifts by the mid-90s, and I can count on one hand the number of times I haven’t purchased a sports game at launch from one of the “major” franchises out there.

Even with this job and its “perks” that I get at times, I still spend hundreds of dollars on sports games every year, and I really don’t even think twice about it. For me, whether it is part of what I do as a job or not, I’d be there on day one because it’s just part of my routine at this point.

We talk a lot in this newsletter, in the Discord, and on OS about the “best” way to release sports games in 2025, but the truth seems to be as long as we’re still out there buying these games every year at the rate we do, it’s almost impossible to see why it would change.

I have at various points been intrigued by free-to-play approaches, and piecemeal/Orange Box approaches where you’re buying parts/modes of sports games you want, but those do feel like fantasies as long as we stay on this trajectory.

Game Sales Are Only Part Of The Equation

Of course, we do need platforms to play these games on, and consoles are a part of that. Between the console price increases and things like Microsoft boosting Game Pass Ultimate to $30 a month, it’s hard to know what the console landscape will look like in the years to come.

Some people might be hoping console prices come back down in price once the “turmoil” of the market balances out, but if you believe someone like former Blizzard president (and former Microsoft gaming VP) Mike Ybarra, Microsoft’s most recent console price increase didn’t have anything to do with tariffs.

While the first price increase did have a direct correlation with tariffs, Ybarra says the latest one had essentially nothing to do with them.

In short, he believes this is part of a larger trend that console makers are just done with selling consoles for a loss, or even just breaking even on them. If you look at the trends mentioned at the start of this newsletter, that sort of makes sense.

Console makers sold consoles at a loss for a long time because the whole idea was people would buy lots of peripherals and video games, and console makers would get a piece of all those sales. Eventually the hardware would also become cheaper to make, and so you would eat the losses early on to get people into the ecosystem.

If fewer people are buying consoles and fewer people are buying multiple a games a year — and many others are simply playing one of a handful of F2P games for years and years — it changes the equation for these companies.

You’re no longer banking on the “long tail” because your market just might be, well, us.

Sports Games Remain An Oddity

The final piece of this does go back to microtransactions and free-to-play games, and this had already been true before this, but it was probably disguised a bit by the surge in hardware and software sales during peak Covid.

As a group, console gamers are now older than they once were. These days you’re introduced to games through phones and tablets more than consoles and PCs. As a kid, I was introduced to games via the Genesis/SNES, but most today will likely be introduced via an iPad or Roblox.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does mean consoles are now the “next” step for prospective gamers rather than the first step. Not everyone is going to make it to that second step, and so you get an older audience by default.

In addition, people don’t need to take the “plunge” and buy an all-new game, they can just play Fortnite for years and never move on to the next thing.

Sports games tie into this changed ecosystem in a sense that sports games are a “gateway drug” to real sports — and vice versa. Sports and video games have this extra special relationship because, for example, some people get into the NFL via Madden.

For me, I learn way more about the real sport for that season when I’m super invested in the sports video game that year. I get to know the rosters much better, and it improves my viewing experience because I know more about each team.

In a way, the way we treat sports games and sports is the way most people will now treat consoles. If they want to care more about video games, consoles and PCs are where they will eventually end up.

All this is a long way of me saying it seems at some point soon we’ll be the normal ones because everyone who gets into consoles and PCs will now be in the relationship we already have been in forever with sports and sports video games.

At that point, we’ll no longer be the oddities, we’ll be the normies.

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

-Chase