The Paradox of Sports Video Gaming

We all want more competition... but do we want what it takes to get it?

These games were GREAT. Not everything from that era was.

The occasion of EA Sports’ annual Super Bowl simulation — which has the Seahawks beating the Patriots 23-20 behind Sam Darnold’s MVP performance¹ — had me thinking this week about the Madden series, and sports video games in general.

My current relationship with sports gaming is… complicated. I’ll admit I did buy Madden and NBA 2K this past year (which is nowhere near the automatic thing that it used to be), in addition to my perennial MLB The Show purchase. Yet, I have also written that the genre is “a shadow of what it used to be” — with EA directly in the middle of a trend that has all but killed the sports video game as we used to know it: a move toward monopolization, consolidation, exclusivity agreements and a general lack of competition in the sports gaming space.

Currently in each of the five major North American sports — football, basketball, baseball, soccer and hockey — there is just a single flagship franchise carrying the major “simulation” category: Madden for the NFL,² 2K for the NBA; The Show for MLB; EA’s NHL series for hockey and EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) for soccer. In each case, competitors once existed, but one by one they dropped away due to either licensing deals — such as the one EA signed in 2004 to lock NFL 2K out of making official games — or a lack of sales.

The result is a sports video-game landscape that offers far less choice than it once did. To illustrate this, here’s an updated version of a chart I originally ran in this story, showing the number of major simulation console sports releases by year over time:

Downstream from this lack of choice is a decrease in innovation as well, which shouldn’t be surprising. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that when a property is insulated from competitive pressure, it stops taking chances and begins resting on its laurels, resulting in a long-term pattern of stagnation.

In fact, that’s a complaint I hear echoed anytime I watch a video analyzing the state of modern sports video games, whether from folks who are rooted in the space (such as SOFTDRINKTV and GameDay) or those who are simply taking a tour through it (like Wimp Wilson and Ghoul City Online!). Every creator seems to be struck by the fact that there is no real motivation for games like Madden to improve anymore, beyond finding new ways to monetize the player base.

And we can indeed see this pattern when we break down the Metacritic scores for those flagship franchises in the years before and after they ceased to face meaningful competition:

On average, Madden, The Show, NBA 2K, NHL and FIFA/EA FC fell from a metascore of 87.6 two years before they stopped having a major competitor to 81.8 the first year they ran unopposed, a figure that dips to 75.5 — a 14 percent decline — after 11 years without a rival. The downward pattern on the right side of the no-competition line in that chart is unmistakable and fairly unanimous.

This is why it has become easy to wax nostalgic (as I have) about the days when there were as many as a half-dozen or more games released per sport per year, giving us bountiful choices to pick from. That’s one of the points made by Jabroni Baseball (a channel I enjoy) in this video investigating the death of baseball video games specifically:

The paradox of sports gaming’s decline, however, is that most of the releases that would be needed to put pressure on a flagship series were themselves not actually very good, and did deserve to be sent to the dustbin of history.

There’s a prevailing myth that the franchises active at the pinnacle of sports gaming all had sustainable audiences and distinct identities that allowed them to compete and stand out in the market. That, if not for unfair market practices and outright monopolistic behavior, we’d be living in a golden age of sports-game choice again.

But as someone who grew up as a huge sports gamer in that era — I was 14 when the PS2 launched in 2000 — I can tell you that most of the “off-brand” games that competed with EA Sports and/or 2K were mediocre at best. Much as I have a soft spot for games like 3DO’s High Heat Baseball and Acclaim’s All-Star Baseball,³ there was next to no reason to play them over EA’s MVP Baseball or even the pre-exclusivity versions of MLB 2K. The same went for series like NBA ShootOut, NFL Fever and Gretzky NHL. With the market oversaturated and the costs to develop licensed sports games rising, these franchises eventually died because they simply weren’t very good and fans didn’t buy them.

We can see this when we plot out the distribution of metascores for all non-”flagship” games during the era of competition in each sport. The average score for a “flagship” game was 85.6, which more than 86 percent of the competitor games failed to match. More than half of non-flagship titles were rated over 10 points of metascore below the flagship standard, and nearly a third of them were not even rated within 20 points of the top series:

At most, there was one real rival series per sport — NFL and NHL 2K, MVP Baseball (when it existed) and later MLB 2K, and NBA Live — that provided viable competition to the primary flagship series in that sport during that era. And even there, the competitor series in hockey and basketball unambiguously died not due to conspiracy, but a natural demise due to high costs and a lack of sales and/or interest. That was at least semi-true in baseball as well, where the series with the exclusivity deal (2K) was actually out-competed by Sony’s The Show, which used a first-party contractual loophole to build the better baseball game and then beat 2K decisively.

The irony, then, is that when it comes to sports gaming, competition is (mostly) the very thing that killed competition. The data strongly suggests that we need fresh takes on these sports to revive the genre out of its current doldrums. But to get those, we need well-heeled companies to spend on competitor franchises that — if history is a guide — will mostly not be very good.

Shoutout if you remember and/or played any of these games.

From that new crop of games, we would potentially get one that pushes the incumbent to improve, whether through overall quality or even just introducing a novel game mechanic that eventually becomes the de rigueur way every entry in the genre has you interact with the sport. (Think of the right-thumbstick craze that swept though all sports games after NBA Live introduced the Freestyle Control dribbling system in 2002.) That evolutionary process has absolutely been missing from sports gaming in recent decades, and it has helped directly lead to the stale state of things in 2026.

To get that, though, you have to wade through a whole lot of regrettable purchases that end with you going back to Madden anyway.

We all say we miss the days of competition pushing the genre to ever-greater heights, but I’m not sure we all want to buy — and play — the games it would take to find the diamonds in the rough. Just like any other part of culture where nostalgia clouds our memories, we have a funny tendency to recall only the best aspects of a bygone era, while ignoring the mediocre parts that made up the majority of the experience. For every MVP Baseball, there was a big stack of forgettable games sitting next to it on the shelf.

The uncomfortable truth is that sports gaming’s stagnation is as much the product of our own revealed preferences as it is of monopolies and licensing deals. And in order to break out of the rut, we must be willing to subsidize failure long enough for success to emerge again. But does anyone — myself included — actually have the patience for that anymore?

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Filed under: Video Games

1. How good are those simulations, btw? It’s sort of beside the point of this story, but in 22 tries since the great Madden 2004 picked New England to beat Carolina by 3 (which ended up actually happening, albeit not by the exact score the game spat out), Madden has correctly called the Super Bowl winner 13 times, or 59 percent of the time:

For comparison, the betting favorite won only 10.5 times (48 percent) in that same span — the “half” coming when the oddsmakers couldn’t decide a favorite for SB XLIX in 2014-15 — though the favorite in the Elo ratings won 13 times as well. So Madden has fared surprisingly well for a one-off game simulation, all things considered.

2. EA did revive its College Football series several years ago as well, but the two games — Madden and College Football — are made by the same company and tend to share a similar gameplay style while also serving distinct enough fan bases (college and pro) to be complementary products, not true rivals.

3. Which had one of the most insane and broken challenge modes in any sports game ever, as detailed by GameDay here.