Where did all the sports games go? -- And why they're not coming back. - RaychelSnr's Blog

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RaychelSnr's Blog

Where did all the sports games go? -- And why they're not coming back. Stuck

Posted on July 14, 2010 at 11:46 AM.

(21)

Think back just a short decade ago.

Sports games were everywhere. Pro football had 4-6 titles each year, NBA fans had multiple titles to choose from and one year there were no less than five MLB games which garnered good to great reviews across the spectrum.

What happened?

Today there is one NFL game, on NCAA game, two MLB games, two NBA games and one and a half hockey games. It's almost like someone came in and turned the power off to the party while everyone was still dancing and having a good time.

I think there are a couple of rational explanations for why those games disappeared and also why they're never coming back. Let's dissect both:

There wasn't enough pie to go around- As much as this sucks -- because I'd love for sports gaming to be much bigger -- the sports gamer is a smaller sect of the overall video game picture than the Final Fantasy/RPG nerd is. (I'm a FPS nerd, so don't start claiming I'm hating here) Plus, Sports games tend to get repetitive whereas in other genres companies can change the rules and scenery of the games. You can't do that in sports. The NBA is still the NBA, whether it's in a game made by EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Take Two, or Sony. The same rules (mostly) still apply to any NBA game ever made. Therefore when push came to shove, there just wasn't enough customers to fund multiple games in each sport in the genre.
Games are getting really hard to make- The smaller projects all but died out (or are becoming internet/downloadable phenoms) because games in this generation require a huge investment in both time and money to make. We as customers demand a more authentic experience to go along with our more powerful hardware and when things don't match up -- we complain. From shoelaces, to jersey types, to lighting intricacies, to the finer points of gameplay which developers didn't have to worry about in generations prior. We basically want our safe and comfortable family car, we just want it to have a big engine and go really fast too.

As we go forward into the future, don't look for these trends to change. Even if the market for sports games grows, the necessary price of entry for new companies with no existing code base sitting around will start to become prohibitively high. The cost will be especially high to compete with the titans at EA and 2K with very intricate systems already in place. In fact, I see a future where sports games become even more scarce, not more bountiful.

I guess the party's over after all.

Why do you think sports games have disappeared? Do you think we'll ever see another year with over 16 games released in major American sports?

Chris is the Executive Editor of Operation Sports and maintains this blog on the site. He is also a native Oklahoman and avid storm chaser. You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisSnr.

Comments

# 16 AgustusM @ Jul 17

where I see a glaring need is in the text sim market. 10 years ago we had multiple options in every sport and now we have only dated options on all sports but baseball and soccer. Text sims should be far easier to make, and require less sales to be profitable since they don't need perfectly rendered stadiums. Football especially needs something new. FOF is a great game but looked dated when it was released in 2007 and is really dated now.