Treat Us Like Adults Sports Game Companies, We Can Take It

I want you lovable weirdos to reach out to me with “mailbag” questions whenever you want. I grew up reading Bill Simmons during the rise of the internet, and so I give you the means to hit me up with comments, thoughts, musings, questions, or whatever else you got. Whether you want to ask me if an MLB The Show franchise mode trade was realistic or not, or explain why no one can ever top Bo Jackson in Super Tecmo Bowl, all are welcome. If I get enough responses, I’d love to feature them in future newsletters or in “mailbags” of our own.

Here is the e-mail: [email protected] (and bonus points if you also include your city, name (or alias), and some sort of subject to go along with your thoughts.

I know I sometimes fill up your inbox with 3,000-plus words about everything a sports game is doing right or wrong, but I don’t think this week’s newsletter is going to take that much time. What I’m going to talk about is also not something I would generally spend a whole newsletter on, but I think every once in a while we need to take a step back and just talk about something a little more intangible like the underlying relationship between sport game companies and us (see: the bozos who buy sports games every year).

From a “business” perspective, treating your consumers with respect is probably a good lesson to live by overall, but when it comes to most sports games, it takes on even more weight. Most of the popular sports games that we care about on OS are yearly titles. Some come out every other year, but the point is a lot of us buy these games many times throughout our lives. We end up with long histories together, and so it does become a sort of relationship. For some of us, it’s a very toxic relationship, but a lot of us still want to make it work!

But one of the worst things you can do in these long relationships we have is not treat us with respect. There is really no need to sugarcoat things or tiptoe around certain issues because we’re past all that. We know your games — and “games” in this case takes on multiple meanings. A lot of us have played these franchises for 5, 10, 15, even 20 years, so we know how this whole song and dance works. Before a game is released, we expect Herb Brooks to walk through that door in Lake Placid and inspire us to think this is the best game in the world.

These declarations about being the best are not always going to be true, and a lot of us need zero inspiration to buy the latest sports game anyway, but we still expect to be sold on the new game. Then we buy or don’t buy the game, and then we complain about or praise it — with some of us declaring we’ll never buy the game again before proving we were lying to ourselves and buying the newest version months later. A lot of us do this every 12 months for years on end. We come to this with inherent baggage, so why not treat us like adults?

This brings me to two games this week: PGA Tour 2K25 and MLB The Show 25. I’m not going to go through the entire history of either of these franchises and their responses to everything, I just want to point out the “right” and “wrong” way to go about talking to us about hot-button issues.

I wrote about PGA Tour 2K25 at the start of this week, and I put most of my thoughts out there about this ongoing issue relating to Virtual Currency and progression in that game. If you’re not in the loop or not playing that game, you probably still know about 2K’s long history with VC (specifically NBA 2K) and how it’s about the least consumer-friendly thing going today in sports games. Everyone hates VC, and there is no good way to talk about the self-evident fact that game companies want to squeeze every dime out of us even after we pay $60-plus to buy a game in the first place. Still, we begrudgingly accept this part of the relationship, we just want to be respected in the process.

This scene from The Gentlemen (not Guy Ritchie’s finest work, but still a pretty fun flick if you haven’t seen it — and has a very good cast) I think is a good representation for how that discussion goes initially, and then how it goes when the respect isn’t there between both parties. Right now, 2K isn’t treating the whole process with the right sort of respect. It’s one thing to have VC in the game, it’s another to change how the whole VC process works after days of early access (and on the eve of the game’s official release). And then it’s another thing entirely to basically say “we’re looking into it” after a deluge of negative responses, only to then change nothing in the days ahead and never really give another “official” update.

Being straight up with us would be way more simple and effective. Rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with if you must, but don’t do the “Facebook maybe” equivalent of saying “we’re looking into it” when most of us know what that means. It’s somewhat easy to figure out 2K felt people were progressing too easily during early access and changed how most things work to slow everyone’s progress down. Like I said in that article, they’re not wrong about progress coming too easily during early access, but you don’t change every single thing and make everything cost way more unless you feel like you’re about to lose a lot of money. These sorts of “exploits” never work in our favor for weeks on end — curious how that works, isn’t it — so it was seemingly a panic move that was made just hours before the game was released to the masses.

To be clear, there is never going to be a positive response when you make something harder to do — no matter how good you are at public relations. However, there is a way to make it worse, and it’s by saying something like “well, we might make adjustments at some point” when people ask if you’re going to revert the changes and bring the experience back to closer to how it felt during early access. You’re going to get some form of Steam review bombing and angry Reddit threads in either case, but you make it worse by dancing around the final outcome because it more or less tells people the only way they might get a “positive” outcome is by going full-on toxic.

No one wins in these situations, and I just don’t understand going down this road when this game has a two-year cycle and has to rely on people having enough good feelings about it to spend money on future Season Pass content and so on. Coming out of the gates by destroying that trust is the worst possible outcome if that is your plan. PGA 2K is not as big as other series out there, and you need to rely on positive word of mouth to make sure it has legs over its two-year lifespan.

With MLB The Show, one of the things I give them credit for each year is dropping their FAQ the same day they announce the latest game. Without fail, it has bad news in it (i.e. we’re not bringing back year-to-year saves or Sounds of the Show), but it just deals with it right away. There is no mystery, and you either accept it or reject it, but it is decided.

Diamond Dynasty is the other part of the equation for this week. DD obviously exists to get money out of us post-release. It can be fun in the process, but that is its purpose. Fans of the mode did not like the version of it in ‘24. They also didn’t like chunks of it in ‘23 either, and these last two years started this downturn for DD that was a real shame because it had easily been the most consumer-friendly and most appreciated card collecting mode around. Whether you like DD or think it’s an evil mode taking away from your precious franchise mode, the point is it used to be better.

Even on OS where these modes are met with a lot of derision, DD had been a fan favorite until recently. Things like sets and seasons, a lack of single-player content, repetitive cards, and a growing need to spend money to keep up were all seeping into the mode and had dragged down its favorability rankings.

SDS responded this week, and I think it’s a good example of “keeping it real” in a gaming relationship.

Now, the obvious point to make is that it’s so much easier to “keep it real” when you have positive things to give to the community and can also retroactively crap all over the old ideas that were in the game before. Still, it’s a clear response and it’s a “mea culpa” that will garner some positivity because it shows you’re listening. You’re probably listening because it’s going to help make you more money with microtransactions, but that’s okay, that’s the relationship (that’s what the money’s for!).

This week was also not the first response SDS had given on the topic of DD. In the midst of people being chapped about how DD was working in ‘24, SDS came out last November and basically gave an “our bad” speech within a blog. That blog post could have come months prior even, but it was still a rare thing to see from a game company. It was an act of contrition and a promise to do better.

Returning to 2025, I’m not going to go through all the changes coming to DD because I already promised not to write 3,000-plus words in this space, but it seems like the mode is returning to its roots overall. Single-player folks still won’t be totally satisfied because I doubt we’re getting 9-inning CPU games that matter, but there is a new mode aimed at single-player folks called Diamond Quest. In addition, it seems like there will be more ways to acquire cards, plus the progression system should be easier to manage no matter how you choose to play the game.

We’ll still have to see how co-op feels, whether “freeze offs” are less prevalent, and see how many cards SDS puts in packs that you can only really snag with money, but it’s been a good week for DD fans. This is how the relationship should look and feel when we’re both treating each other like adults.

Before I get out of here, I do want to point out two other MLB The Show notes. SDS revealed the top players on every team so argue among yourselves about that if you wish. On top of that, in my newsletter last week, I talked about likely legacy issues sticking around in franchise mode, one of them being regression/progression. Again, I think that is going to remain an issue in ‘25, but content creator TheAntOrtiz added a little more context to the topic based on what SDS has said for ‘25, and I wanted you folks to be able to hear that in case you missed it.

(The video above should be timestamped to get you right to the section on regression/progression. Ant’s also a great follow if you like franchise mode playthroughs.)

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

-Chase