Let’s get one thing straight: I like sports, at least for the most part. I’m not a huge fan of baseball or soccer, but I love football (American), I used to be an avid basketball fan, and I’ve been known to watch hockey with great interest. So when I ask this, know that it isn’t from the view of someone who just hates sports in general:
Why do sports video games suck so very, very much?
I adored “NFL GameDay 2001” for the Playstation 2, but since then, I haven’t found a sports game worth even really trying. They are all the same, boring tripe, just molded around different sports. Plus it doesn’t help that EA basically cornered the market on the major sports leagues, when it comes to video games.
Just look at the Madden franchise. They release basically the same game, year after year, with only the occasional tweak to gameplay and of course the updated team rosters. But for all intents and purposes, Madden 26 is basically Madden 25 with shuffled players. But EA charges you a premium price every year for the “new” edition, while effectively neutering the previous edition.
Is that right? Is it fair? Even if you might enjoy the general gameplay, EA is ripping you off every single year, rather than producing a game and just sending updates every year. EA could be putting out Madden games every five years or so, releasing team updates and feature tweaks and bugfixes along the way, and do just as well. But instead, they just have to dip into fans pockets for $80 or so on an annual basis, because they can.
Then there’s FIFA, which is a complete and total scam. The microtransactions in that franchise are legendary for how disgusting they are, and yet… People still play it. Why? Because soccer is the most popular game in the world, and EA has (again) a monopoly on the soccer video game market. Not because other people can’t make soccer games, they absolutely can, just not using the FIFA players that EA has absolute, exclusive rights to use in their game alone.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. You show me a modern sports video game, and I’ll show you a game that most likely sucks. Sure, it might be popular, but not because it is a good game in itself, but because most of the time, it is the biggest and possibly only video game covering that sport with access to real players of that game.
This is why I prefer the old days, when you could have multiple companies making sports games including the likenesses of actual players. EA didn’t have a stranglehold on the market, and as such, gaming companies had to make, y’know, actual good games, rather than just pump out the same old slop every year.
But hey, what do I know?