While I reminisce about sports gaming in 2008 and optimistically look forward to what is to come in 2009, one trend that may have surprisingly emerged is the renewed production of sports-management titles on the current generation consoles.

Ever since the debacle that was the original NFL Head Coach, people would not be remiss if they believed that sports sims had no more chances left. But ever since the surprise announcement and subsequent release of NFL Head Coach 09 earlier this year, it suddenly appears that sports sims on consoles may indeed have a future. The fact that NFL HC 09 also managed to garner some positive critical success certainly did not hurt matters.

But what might really set things in motion is 2K Sports’ upcoming sports-management title, MLB Front Office Manager. The success (or failure) of MLB FOM may well dictate whether sports-management games have any long-term viability on consoles.

While this potential re-emergence is exciting, there are many questions that are just begging to be explored.

First, I wonder what influence, if any, PC-based text sims such as Football Manger, Out of the Park and Front Office Football had in fueling this current sports-management renaissance. Based on past relationships and endeavors, I speculate that there could be an influence -- for instance with EA and Solecismic Software. But I believe the bigger influence has simply been a change in sports gamers’ preferences and overall acceptance of sports-management games.

However, it is not always that simple. I ponder why in the past -- particularly in North America -- there has been an aversion to sports-management games. What made NA gamers so different from those in Europe and Asia? I cannot really say.

I also make the assertion that the proliferation of the Internet during the last decade has made a world of difference in creating an audience of sophisticated sports fans who have helped fuel the rise of the text-sim community and industry.

Finally, I wonder what 2009 and beyond holds for the genre. In particular, I wonder what effect games like NFL Head Coach 09 and MLB Front Office Manager may potentially have on their PC-based brethren. Can PC- and console-based sports sims co-exist or are they eventually bound to war with each other? Where should they concentrate their money and development prowess in the interim?

These are all questions that I will attempt to answer, though, I do not expect many (or any) to agree with my analysis.

Will Front Office Manager make sports management games more viable on consoles?

A Launching Pad

When considering whether text sims have had an influence on games like NFL Head Coach and MLB Front Office, there is a possibility that they may have had an effect, but it may require a few degrees of separation.

For example, it has been speculated that the creation of Madden’s Franchise mode was inspired in part by the text sim, Baseball Mogul. And Madden’s Franchise mode, although by no means an innovator in that regard, certainly served as an impetus and example that many, if not all, modern franchise modes have been based upon. It is also the more likely blueprint that games such as NFL Head Coach and MLB Front Office Manager have been made from. So you could say that there has been a text-sim influence, albeit not direct, in the development of the franchise mode in many sports games.

Another example can be seen with EA’s past relationship with Solecismic Software. EA published previous versions of Front Office Football. That relationship, which almost resulted in the packaging of FOF with the PC version of Madden, may have influenced EA’s future development plans with Madden and the NFL Head Coach series.

So while there are some concrete examples to consider, what I find more peculiar when considering the influence that text sims may have had on Head Coach or Front Office Manager, is exactly how much of the text-sim industry’s success may have also been derived from sports console games.

Again, I turn to Madden’s Franchise mode as an example. I contend that it was actually the franchise mode in console games, like Madden, that led many gamers -- but certainly not all to be clear -- to text sims in the first place. These players were simply enamored with what Madden had to offer, but it was not enough. They wanted better player ratings, realistic salary rules, smarter A.I., better depth, a plethora of stats, accurate simulation results and a ton more features. They subsequently found that text sims like Front Office Football met their demands. It is like someone who is addicted to GM mode in Smackdown vs. Raw, wanting more, and then finding something like Total Extreme Wrestling.

Furthermore, although I admit this is anecdotal, I can attest that this course of action was certainly true for me. Personally, my interest in text sims grew out of my fascination and addiction to Madden’s Franchise mode. A couple years later, I was online and saw someone recommending FOF 2, which had just been released. Needless to say, I bought it and I was hooked. Also, my interest in FOF led me to other text sim titles like OOTP 3, Jump Shot Basketball and others.

I offer this speculation, not because it is not obvious, but because I find it funny that the console games had this potential all along. Console sports games did not need text sims to serve as a middle man of influence, but developers' long-held refusal to really offer the realism, accuracy, features, depth and intelligence to compete with text sims cost them. It was only the rare game such as All-Star Baseball that attempted to offer a complete palette of franchise features that could compete with an OOTP.

Perhaps this lack of innovation in the franchise-mode area could be explained as the result of publishers and developers that believed sports-management games would meet an unreceptive audience here in North America. It certainly appears that way when you consider how accepted management sims are overseas.

Baseball might be the ticket to get sports-management into the mainstream.

NIMBY, Not Anymore

While the sports-management genre has struggled to escape from its PC text-sim niche here in North America, it has done extremely well in Europe and Asia.

Just consider that overseas, the sport of football/soccer alone has resulted in a slew of sports-management series of games like LMA Manager, Total Club Manager, Premier Manager -- all of which have appeared on a variety of platforms like the Playstation, Xbox, Playstation 2 and PC. During this generation, there has been multiple releases of Football Manager on the Xbox 360 and PSP, but not in North America. Other successful sports-management games include Cycling Manager and F1 Manager.

And in Japan, forget about just sports, there is a management sim for almost anything you can imagine. For one, they really like their horse-racing sims over there. But another egregious example of treating North-American audiences differently -- an example I still cry about -- can be seen with the North-American port of Fire Pro Wrestling 2 for the Game Boy Advance. When released in Japan, FPW 2 included a pretty deep Ring mode, which acted like a mini portable version of Extreme Warfare Revenge. However, when it was ported to North America, the mode was removed without a trace. What a waste; I would still be playing that mode to this day if it had been included.

But why is there a double standard? All I can assume is that developers have treated the North American audience differently because they thought most of us were joystick jockeys who absolutely needed to control the action. After all, sports-management games are not generally targeted toward a casual, mass audience but rather a niche, knowledgeable base. Maybe developers felt that North America lacked that audience, and perhaps that is still true today.

It is puzzling because in the last decade, this has not been a problem in other genres. I mean some gamers prefer the hands-off strategy of a Final Fantasy Tactics or any RTS, while others prefer hands-on action of a Legend of Zelda or FPS.

However, the recent developments of NFL Head Coach 09 and MLB Front Office Manager now show that there are signs that a change is taking place. And I strongly believe that we have the Internet to thank for that.

Thank the Net

As I said earlier, there are many console players whose interest in franchise modes in games like Madden, NBA 2K and NHL served as launching points for text sims like OOTP, FOF, EWR, FM, etc. However, without the Internet, those players would be out of luck because it is the Internet that has made it possible for text sims to thrive.

Just consider the numerous ways that the text-sim community has benefited. First, the Internet has made it easier for independent developers to get noticed, a fact applies to pretty much every text sim. But to be more specific, games like Extreme Warfare Revenge and Eastside Hockey Manager started out as celebrated freeware titles that eventually grew into commercialized products.

Also, it is not as if these text-sim developers have million-dollar budgets at their disposal to launch mass-marketing campaigns. So the ease of communication on the Internet has led to a sustained and rapid growth of customers and fans that has been generated almost purely on word of mouth in specific communities like OS and FOF Central. It also does not hurt that developers of these games are very open with their community and offer a sense of transparency and communication that have served as models that developers like EA are now trying to emulate.

Text sims have also been able to flourish because fans are more knowledgeable than ever before, and I believe we also have the Internet to thank for that

Thanks to the Internet, sports fans currently have a wealth of options available to them if they want to increase their general knowledge of pretty much any sport. Consider the amount sports-news sites, statistical sites/resources like 82games.com, fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, a multitude of message boards to discuss your favorite teams, encyclopedic resources like Baseball-Reference to look through, the increased popularity of sports figures like Bill James, books like Money Ball, and I do not even want to get into the deeper end of things with SABRmetrics or Hollinger and his basketball stats. It is truly never ending.

There is also something like the increased proliferation of fantasy players and fantasy leagues. In fact, a big selling point in MLB Front Office Manager, the online mode, is geared towards fantasy players.

The knowledge some fans have these days could rival any GM. It is not out of the norm for fans these days to be able to name all players on every team, their stats, their contract situation, their strengths and their weaknesses. When you consider that this is probably applicable for multiple sports, it simply astounds.

Simply put, the Internet has allowed for a marriage of convenience that has allowed for the creation of a mass audience of knowledgeable fans, and the ability to find text sims that cater to their demands.

So when it comes down to it, there has never been a better time for sports-management games to succeed on consoles. The foundation of an audience is now there, but it still needs to be cultivated. And with both PC and console sports sims at a potential crossroads, it will be interesting to see how they both evolve in the near future.

Out of the Park Baseball is one of the most noteworthy baseball text-simulations for the PC.

What Is To Come?

When considering the future of text sims and console sports-management titles, it is important to consider where they both stand at the moment.

For text sims, they have reached a moment in time where they have to contend with a few significant factors.

First, text sims are constantly facing the pressure of innovating their off-the-field features while improving on various things like roster/free agency/trade logic, statistical/simulation accuracy, and the intelligence of CPU competitors. These are the reasons why people play these games instead of the console sports games, so of course these things are always an important factor. Nevertheless, it is no longer the only one.

Now with the potential appearance and pseudo-competition of console sports-management games, many text sims may now face the secondary challenge of presenting their information in a way that is entertaining and engaging. In other words, they must not make players feel like they are just playing an Excel game. Some games are further along than others. For example, Football Manager 09 recently made the leap to 3-D, while other games like OOTP 9 have also undergone presentational enhancements to keep up.

So in the near future, text sims will have at least two factors to consider when moving forward, but they will always have a couple of hooks that console games will have difficulty trying to match. In particular, the option of long-term historical play remains a huge selling point. Also, there is a flexibility in terms of custom options, custom leagues, custom rosters, teams and custom players that is unmatched. It is that creative allowance that will not be matched by console games any time soon. However, text sims may no longer be alone in providing a comprehensive career mode or perhaps offering multiplayer leagues.

As far as console sports-management games are concerned, they are also in a strange position. In the past, console sports games were reliant on excellent gameplay to hook you in. But the best games were able to combine the two -- such as Legacy Mode in College Hoops 2K8, which successfully melded the depth of a great text sim with amazing on-the-court gameplay.

In order to succeed, these console games will absolutely have to provide a solid foundation beneath all the graphical flash to ensure survival. A broken statistical engine, awful roster management and nonsensical trades are all factors that can kill a game. So hopefully future developers take a lesson from text sims and solidify this part of the game before anything else.

But overall, I believe we are at a crossroads at the moment. Text sims and sports-management console games are constantly coming closer together. Sure, it may take years for them to compete on truly even terms, but I think we are headed in that direction. Whether that is a good thing or not, well I am not sure of that quite yet.

Despite all that, I hope developers will not be afraid to innovate. With the technology currently at our disposal, there is no telling what developers can accomplish. Heck, if someone could just take the gameplay of NHL 94 and combine it with the depth of EHM, I would personally be in sports heaven. But regardless of what dream game you wish for in the future, it is clear that as we head into 2009 and beyond, there has never been a better time to be a text-sim or sports-management fan.