When Did the Arcade Sports Games Era End?

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I didn’t touch on the overall history of arcade sports games in this week’s newsletter when discussing the ingredients that go into a classic arcade sports game, but I think as a little addendum it’s worth going into that a bit more.

More specifically, when did we lose the arcade part of the sports game scene?

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There was no one moment that did in the arcade sports game scene, but in retrospect it seems to me that three things ended it during the mid-2000s.

The first was that Midway was totally and utterly mismanaged. Even if the NFL was eventually going to steer away from working with Midway after being uncomfortable with aspects of NFL Blitz, the arcade sports part of the publisher wasn’t the issue — even if the quality of games did start to drop off by 2004.

Midway went public in ‘96, and it’s sort of all downhill from there in terms of how they start running the company. It’s the usual song and dance we’ve seen before where they try to grow and grow. They do this by taking on debt, and then they try to buy studios to get out of it, and then it all eventually blows up in their face when the games don’t sell enough — and never had a chance to.

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NBA Ballers, MLB Slugfest, and Blitz: The League were not “pantheon” games either during this 2000s run, so it’s not as if the quality remained at an all-time high. However, nothing short of NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat being more popular than ever would have saved them by this point.

At the same time, the EA Sports BIG brand was still producing great games, but it’s clear now the overall company was about to go in a different direction.

NFL Street, NFL Street 2, NBA Street Vol. 2, and Def Jam Vendetta all hit within 2003-2004 (holy shit, they were cooking), but priorities were about to change.

Fight Night 2004 was released in 2004 by EA Vancouver and NuFX, but EA Chicago was about to become a thing for Fight Night Round 2 and beyond. That studio took parts of the Def Jam and Fight Night crews and would eventually be working on Fight Night Round 3 for the Xbox 360.

And this is where the second and third things that marked the downfall of arcade sports games come together. The next-gen era, like with a lot of things in the video game industry, brought about massive changes.

For EA, it was ultimately a lot of bad changes, even if Fight Night Round 3 was awesome and a hit. It’s not as if EA forgot how to make arcade sports games, but they took a lot of those talented developers and had them on new projects that took more people and more time.

We’d still get NBA Street Homecourt in 2007, which even if like a lot of games from that era had a weird piss filter on it and took some hits for not being as great as previous titles, was still a really good game.

But the output dropped considerably overall by the next-gen era, and the games that came out dropped in quality as well. NFL Tour was awful, FIFA Street never caught on like the other franchises, and SSX mostly vanished until being rebooted in 2012.

In part, I’m sure EA was spooked by the drop in quality, but the bigger issues were likely that development costs went way up, the time and amount of people to make these games went up, and it was harder to justify a full price on arcade sports games.

It’s why Blitz and Jam did get reboots in an era where “digital” games were still a novelty, and they were released at “arcade” prices of $15. That experiment clearly failed as EA would abandon them as well, but the golden era of arcade sports games was already over by then either way.

At the end of the day, we want variety and choice like the “old days” with our sports games, but in video games you still need a couple giants to set the tone and prove there is money to be made. We hate the power these big publishers have over the sports space, but you also need them to take some risks that smaller companies can’t always take.

Midway and EA were those giants, and when they faltered, the rest of the arcade sports game scene did as well. The fact that development costs and licensing costs went up with the next-gen era was the other ingredient that helped accelerate the downfall of arcade sports games.

Developers and publishers are still trying to solve the “cost” issue associated with making games. Smaller teams can make great games — just like they used to in the world before HD graphics — and it seems more and more we’re seeing smaller teams make awesome video games, but it doesn’t seem like big publishers and development houses have figured out how to have small teams in-house make fantastic games at the same rate they used to (at least not yet).

Here’s Everything From This Week In Sports Games

Speaking of things I talked about from Wednesday’s newsletter, NBA The Run is having another playtest in the near future, and they’ll be adding new dribble moves and a variety of gameplay tweaks to the game during it.

The dribble moves that are being added are especially important because the game still needs a boost in signature style. They have a bunch of signature animations for dunks so far, but if they’re going all-in on only having NBA royalty in the game, which seems to be the case (sorry to Eric Montross and all the other average to below average players that played a part in the magic of NBA Jam), then you need to make each one unique.

They have a tight window to get things done before the June 9 release date, so I’m sure it’s intense right now for that development team.

Elsewhere, EA lifted part of the embargo surrounding UFC 6, and they released a gameplay deep dive.

As I always say, I’m the furthest thing from a UFC expert, so I don’t have a ton of thoughts of my own, but it seems most people are chapped about the “flow state” animation that has been added.

I don’t think flow state itself seems like a bad idea, but the presentation of it definitely does seem out of place in a game that’s supposed to represent the UFC.

UFC 6 has a June 19 release date, and I do think it’s a “make or break” time for the franchise. If this one doesn’t do well, it feels like that might be it for the franchise.

Speaking of EA, if you need a new reason to be mad at them, it’s being reported they’re a major reason why Xbox did not go with a “family plan” option for Game Pass. If anyone shares a Steam account with other people, you might know the joy of sharing a massive library of games, and Game Pass was looking into something like this.

However, Xbox does not have the same dominant market share that Steam/Valve does, so publishers can lean on them in a way Steam can laugh at and ignore — Valve knows at this point if you’re not on Steam, your PC game is probably not going to do well, so they can set the terms.

EA apparently leaned on Microsoft not to do this, and because EA Play is a major selling point for Game Pass (EA and MS are partners in a sense), EA reportedly vetoed this family plan option.

I’ve talked about my love of Super Battle Golf multiple times, and it seems golf might be the star sport of 2026 as “friendslop” and golf are teaming up once more with Yodelee Golf.

I’m all in on silly golf games, so I’ll be checking this one out for sure, but for now it’s just “coming soon” on Steam. One of its main feature is going to be a visual transcription of everything you say on voice comms, which surely won’t be a problem.

As for games already out, I don’t think it’s crazy to say Forza Horizon 6 is a hit, and is probably going to be sports/racing game of the year for a ton of outlets. It’s a beautiful and fun game, and it’s easily one of the best reviewed sports/racing games in years.

Check it out if you have Game Pass, or just buy it if you have even an inkling of interest in racing games. It’s dynamite.

Finally, from OS proper, just a couple articles I want to highlight from the crew. Tyler wrote about why he’s out on MLB The Show. He looked at it from more of an online perspective, and I totally get it in that sense. Without any sort of online franchise/season mode with friends, it’s only getting more miserable out there in the competitive scene.

We even had reports of a Nationals minor league pitcher cheating his ass off against a streamer in an online game. Cheating in The Show is easier to do these days, and it seems even the pros might be getting in on it.

That said, I am still having a great time with my offline franchise, and I do think SDS has righted the ship at least in that sense the last couple years. However, the DD and online scene has gone down in quality at the same time, so it seems like SDS just can’t quite get everything moving in the right direction all at once.

Speaking of which, Rob asked the question, is there a chance anyone else could return to baseball now that we know 2K has no plans to do so.

That’ll do it for me this week. Have an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend, summer has arrived.