Sports Games Are Too Big, but Is There a Solution?

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To let you in on a little ChaseB lore, I have been both a video game developer and then obviously someone who writes about video games. While I don’t do video game development anymore, the main reason I liked it was because it’s a solutions-oriented job. The thing I’ve always bumped up against when writing about games is it’s not necessarily a solutions-oriented job. For example, I’ve never liked reviewing games because you’re mostly just saying what you liked or disliked about them. I don’t just like saying something sucks. I want to explain why it sucks, and then explain how I’d improve it.

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(I have gotten more comfortable with reviewing stuff over the years, but I’d still rather do it in a silly fashion like I sometimes do on GG.app — basically the Letterboxd equivalent for video games — please sign-up and add me as I’m always happy to have more friends on there.)

This is a roundabout way of explaining that I’m not a fan of criticizing something without a real solution in mind. However, the “bigness” of sports games is a topic I’ve wanted to talk about in more depth for a bit. But here’s a spoiler, at the end of this I’m not going to have a concrete solution. Instead, I more want to talk about how and why we got here, and then what the options even are for how to “fix” this problem.

Another week, another poke about taking our Google survey. It’s an effort to try and understand why you subscribe both to this newsletter and what you care about for the present and future of OS. I beg you to take it if you have a moment.

I briefly touched on the “bigness” topic last week in my newsletter about why I thought MLB The Show 25 should have a lot to prove.

It feels right to start with The Show then because we did get the reveal trailer this week:

The OS response to the trailer was about what I expected because the graphics and animations clearly didn’t take a huge leap (at least in the examples shown in the trailer). And I expected that response from the OS faithful because it’s, well, what I predicted in the newsletter. This isn’t to pat myself on the back, it’s to point out what I want to talk about.

Sports Games Are Too Big, But How Did We Get Here?

At this moment and time, there is no realistic way for a major sports game to make improvements to all the existing features while still adding new stuff on top of it all. What’s here instead is this piecemeal approach where cycle to cycle the developers are trying to add to certain parts of the game more than others. Each mode sort of gets its turn depending on the year. This means the franchise mode in your favorite game takes bigger leaps some years and then barely moves during others.

Now, it would be easy to point out that’s the way it’s always been, and that is 100 percent true. Whether it’s NHL 95 to NHL 96 or NBA 2K24 to NBA 2K25, incremental improvements have always been a thing. It’s not like it ever really feels like a “brand new” game when we boot up the latest and greatest. We’re playing recreations of real sports, so there’s always a baseline that you’re going back to rather than some all-new game.

That said, as graphics have plateaued a bit with the technology, we’re now at a point where we have these games that are very expensive to make but no longer have the same obvious side-by-side graphical improvements or generation-to-generation improvements. This means sports games can’t simply be sold on those graphical leaps anymore.

Just think back through the generations and how seismic those graphical jumps were until recent times.

• NES to SNES/Genesis - HUGEEE

• SNES/Genesis to PS1/N64 - HUGE

• PS1/N64 to Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox - HUGEEEEEEEEE

• PS2/Xbox to PS3/Xbox 360 - HUGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

• PS3/Xbox 360 to PS4/Xbox One - yeah, okay

• PS4/Xbox One to PS5/Xbox Series X - oh, huh…

The obvious issues with the last two generations are that while things have undeniably gotten more visually impressive, the ROI isn’t there anymore. The cost jumped to an insane degree when going from standard-def to high-def, but that jump in cost seemed like it was worth it at the time, even if that was the beginning of the end of having tons of sports games. Costs have only continued to go up, so now the question seems like it should be “why are we still going down this road?”

Sports games — or any sequels — have this issue on an even grander scale because it’s expected that the “sequel” will be bigger and better. And it’s not like this is just a video game problem, either. If you want to look at movies, when you jump from the original to the sequel, the same is expected. Rambo, Terminator, Alien, John Wick, and on and on. There is more action, more set pieces, and more money in the budget for the sequels.

The big difference is you can tear up a movie from one to the next. You might have some of the same characters, lore, and some of the same actors, but it’s a new slate — a new script. It’s a new budget and a new project.

You can’t do the same thing from one sports game to the next. You take the infrastructure — even if it’s rotten — and have to just figure it out a lot of the time. You don’t have the time to tear it all down and rebuild it, and on top of that, you’re expected to deliver something new on top of what already exists. And every new thing you add comes with its own set of bugs and issues that slow progress down.

Making games is frustrating in the best of environments, and I’m sure creating movies/TV/books/and so on is frustrating as well. Frustration comes with creativity and creating art of any sort.

Still, this cost problem exists, and the development time issue exists for yearly sports games. To make a comparison, there’s this really good (but long) deck/document that Matthew Ball released that discusses the outlook for video games in 2025. OS user studbucket posted it in the forums, and while I’m not going to talk about all 200+ slides, there’s a section on the recent Spider-Man games that I think is helpful for this conversation.

To keep things moving, I’m going to sidestep explaining the definition of a “Black Hole” game, but otherwise, here are the slides for Insomniac’s Spider-Man games that illuminate the issue I’m talking about:

All this seems to show that you should spend less on a sequel not more, and yet that never really happens. You create the sequel because you now have an audience that feels comfortable with your franchise. Large video game companies are risk-averse when they can be, so they’re going to want to do a sequel rather than an all-new series. The problem is your baked-in audience expects more from a sequel, so the idea is you have to go bigger to lure them in again. At the same time, you’re either going to have some portion of the audience that’s burned out and has no interest in the sequel, or you’re going to have new people who don’t play the sequel because they didn’t play the original and feel like they’ll be left out.

Now, I think that last point is not as relevant to sports games, but the other aspects match up pretty nicely. You can see how you get into this brutal cycle where costs keep going up because we as consumers expect more, but there’s only so much you can do in a short amount of time. The quality of the game overall suffers even as it grows in scope.

“Official” Sports Games Have Their Own Extra Issues

Sports games come with their own special cost issues beyond the general cost of video game development. Licensing is a big deal. I don’t think these licenses get cheaper over time. My guess is, like with most things, they just get more expensive.

A lot of sports games “died” after the end of the PS2/Xbox era not just because video game development became way more pricey, but because the licensing got more costly. Even ignoring the NFL exclusivity conundrum and how it set the stage for all the chaos that ensued at the end of the PS2/Xbox era, rising development costs in conjunction with licensing costs put a squeeze on these video game companies.

It clearly no longer made economical sense for there to be nine NBA games in a season like there was back in 1999. Now, I would hope there is a middle ground between 1 and 9, but the point is two major costs were too much for most companies to handle because the audience was only so big.

To bring it back to video games at large, it’s interesting to note how costs/profits/whatever-else-you-want-to-equate-it-to are leading most companies to look at ending exclusivity again. Sony is delivering most of their biggest exclusives to PC now after a set amount of time passes. The same is true for companies like Square Enix bringing their games to PC and elsewhere. There’s even plenty of rumors that Microsoft is set to bring things like Halo or other games from companies they now own to other platforms.

This leads me into the last section…

Are There Any Solutions?

Looking beyond the low-hanging fruit of saying magical solutions like “just figure out how to make video game development 10,000 times cheaper,” let’s discuss a couple more “practical” solutions.

Sticking with exclusivity, if it’s dying elsewhere, could it die for sports games? I think the NFL is the only one with the closest thing to “true” exclusivity. With the MLB and NBA, it more seems like other companies just don’t want to pay the price to make a game. But is there a point where EA, 2K, or insert-company-here finally balks and says, “Look, this license is too much money. We want to be in business with you still, but maybe it makes more sense to get money from two/three/four companies rather than one.” I would guess the initial response might be that sports league trying to get their requested price from another company first, but is there a world where every company turns a sports league down? Or, to put it another way, is there a scenario where the sports league realizes it can get more money by playing ball.

In that scenario, maybe the solution is that multiple companies divvy up the licensing to be able to make their own games. EA/2K split the bill and agree it makes good business sense for both to be able to make licensed sports games if they can pay less for licensing. It isn’t all that different from what Sony/Microsoft seem to be poised to be doing with their games and sharing them with other platforms.

Could you just crush these games down and shrink them? Give us fewer options if it means what’s there has more depth and quality. Sports games are massive, and there are large portions of these games that most individuals do not play. When you buy a sports game, you’re usually buying it specifically for one or two modes. You’re a franchise mode person, or an Ultimate Team person, or a career mode person, or you just want to play online head-to-head. You’re not playing every mode. You might barely know what The City looks like in NBA 2K, but you have 4,000 hours in MyNBA.

On top of that, some of these modes are awful. And, I don’t mean “awful” like Ultimate Team being “evil” because of the microtransactions. I mean they’re not good experiences. We all know which franchise modes or career modes are worth playing and not. I’m aware everyone has a favorite mode in these sports games, and removing any one thing probably upsets someone, but it might be worth it to pull the plug on some modes that just don’t do enough for the quality of the game. Sports games have tanked in terms of review scores in the past couple years, and while “removing” bad things doesn’t make scores go up, the overall quality of a game does matter. If graphics are no longer the answer, then better features have to be the answer. And bigger does not always mean better, even if you have a hard time explaining that to consumers.

Lastly, I remember talking with a developer at EA around the time The Orange Box came out, and he was very passionate about the idea that this could be something that sports games could maybe look at. For those who don’t know, this was a game from Valve that included a bunch of their old games, plus three new ones. The simplest way to explain it was you got five games in one box. You did not buy each game individually, but the idea was you were buying five games for the price of one full game. I’m not saying a “compilation” was some amazing innovation since it had obviously existed before Orange Box, but it did still feel like this important moment that maybe would lead to more companies thinking about new ways to package their new and old games together.

The Orange Box came out in 2007, so, yeah, nothing like that ever really happened for sports games. What did happen was the idea of free-to-play games taking up a bigger part of the scene. But for sports games, free-to-play concepts just got added on top of a full-price game. They double dipped, and that double dipping has slowly eroded trust and worn out some of us because it feels like buying the game is just the first of the costs.

I will always argue that a lot of us are paying full price for just one mode. In essence, while a sports game is not a “compilation” in the way The Orange Box was, franchise mode is its own game. The City is its own game. I mean there were years I bought sports games and exclusively played online head-to-head. I think with Madden 2005 I played 500+ online H2H games and probably only a couple seasons of franchise mode (and that franchise mode was good, I was just hopelessly addicted to comp that year.)

So is there an Orange Box future that could make sense for sports games? You get the “base” game for free or a low cost, and then you spend $20 for franchise mode and have that unlocked — and so it goes for other modes. If you unlock everything, maybe it’s more than the full price you pay for a game today, but that’s your choice.

It’s an interesting idea in that companies would know exactly what people are spending money on to unlock (just like they do now in free-to-play games), but it’s tied to larger pieces of content rather than gambling on packs or buying cosmetics. It’s so different from most things out there, that maybe it couldn’t work, but if there were the right kind of experiment for this idea, it would be sports games.

It’s impossible to predict the future, but I think it’s worthwhile to have these sorts of talks from time to time because we all love sports games and want to have the best experiences possible while playing them. I do think sports games need to make a change, and while the “business” side of things might make that choice for them at some point, how to creatively attack this ongoing issue is going to mean somebody has to take the first plunge. I’m not sure who might do that, but I hope they step forward soon.

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

-Chase