Will College Football 25 Save the Sports Video Game?

It had better. Because right now, the genre is a shadow of what it used to be.

One of the most anticipated sports-game releases I can remember happens this week, when EA Sports College Football 25 hits shelves on Friday.

The game marks a return for the college-sports genre, which had been dormant for more than a decade after NCAA Football 14 came out in July 2013, and it represents a major evolution for all games of this ilk. In the years since NCAA Football 14, O'Bannon v. NCAA was decided — opening the doors for college athletes to be compensated for their name, image, and likeness (NIL) — which in turn enables this new game to actually feature real players out of the box for the first time.¹

And by many accounts, the game was worth the wait. (Being a lowly blogger, I haven’t played it yet, but I will probably sink a lot of time into it very soon.) From everything I’ve seen, the team at EA Sports seems to have actually put care and effort into faithfully recreating college football in a video-game form, from the gameplay to the presentation.

But I have to admit, I was skeptical about their ability to do that. Because EA has also been at the center of a multi-decade trend that has all but killed the sports video game as we used to know it.

As I wrote about back in 2020, sports games have been in a rut for a long time now — and it’s not like things have been any better in the four years since. To measure how bad the state of sports gaming has gotten, I compiled review data from Metacritic and GameRankings going back to 1998 for major-console² North American game releases based on pro (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and soccer) and college (NCAA football/basketball) sports.³ I categorized them into “Simulation” or “Arcade” style games, and tracked trends in both the number and quality of releases over time.

The first thing to notice is that the sheer number of sports games has gone down massively since the 1990s and early 2000s. At its peak in 2002, there were a staggering 37 (!) different games based on the sports we’re looking at, including 10 basketball games, 9 football games, 8 soccer games, 7 baseball games and 3 hockey games. (And remember, we’re not double-counting multi-console releases of the same game. There just were that many choices out there for sports gamers.) But the mid-2000s were a seminal moment for the sports gaming industry, and not in a good way.

From 2005 onward, the number of games per year has steadily decreased to just 7 in 2023 and 4 so far in 2024 (granted, before the releases of CFB 25 and Madden 25):

That the year 2005 stands out as a turning point is no coincidence. That’s when EA signed an exclusive rights agreement with the NFL to make Madden the only officially licensed simulation football game associated with the league.

Rather than fight with NFL 2K, which had just beaten Madden head-to-head in terms of critical acclaim — 2K5 squeaked out the Metacritic victory, 92 to 91 — and was close to catching them in sales, too — in part because 2K5 undercut Madden with a significantly lower price point — EA decided to freeze out the competition. And thus, the era of reduced choices and market consolidation had begun.

Other exclusivity deals followed suit, such as 2K’s (in retrospect, disastrous) agreement with MLB that killed EA’s beloved MVP Baseball franchise — 2004 and 2005’s winner of the mythical Baseball Video Game Championship belt. At the same time, the NBA 2K series vanquished EA’s NBA Live without the help of any deal-making, simply because Live fell off the face of the planet during the seventh-generation console era. (Similarly, MLB: The Show blasted MLB 2K into oblivion by making vastly better games.)

Speaking of changing console generations, the cost of developing so-called AAA games has skyrocketed in recent years, for a variety of reasons ranging from graphics to marketing. With the barrier to entry rising across the video game market, the number of companies even attempting to make licensed sports games has shrunk considerably. EA Sports is now essentially the only company who makes a major NFL, NHL or soccer game (the latter holding even after EA lost the long-running FIFA license); 2K is the only major NBA game-maker, while Sony/San Diego Studio makes the only MLB game in the major-console space.

This trend towards consolidation and, effectively, league-license monopolies has taken a major toll on the quality of these games.

When the volume of options was near its highest in 2003, the average highest-rated simulation NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/Soccer game of the year carried an average Metascore of 90.8, the highest mark on record:

That year, we got highly rated pro-sports games across the board, in baseball (World Series Baseball 2K3, with a Metascore of 89); basketball (NBA 2K3, 89); football (Madden NFL 2004, 94); hockey (NHL 2K3, 89) and soccer (Pro Evolution Soccer 2, 93). We also got the 89-rated NCAA Football 2004 and an 83-rated NCAA College Basketball 2K3, plus such non-simulation gems as the goated NBA Street Vol. 2 (with its 90 Metascore).

Things could not be more different nowadays. The average Metascore of the top-rated pro-sports simulation console games hit its all-time low of 71.8 in 2021, and while it “recovered” some to 74.2 in 2022 and 74.4 in 2023, it’s down again to 73.5 so far this year — and I doubt Madden 25 will be of much help. (It might actually drag 2024’s average below 2021’s mark, so stay tuned.)

All told, the state of sports games is pathetic right now — and the review scores above might be understating the depth of the problem. Professional reviewers try to capture all facets of the game, but they seldom have enough time before publishing their scores to delve fully into the pernicious world of microtransactions that each of these current games are riddled with. These types of “live services” account for about 70 percent of EA’s revenue — so if you want to understand why sports games are such a disaster, that’s a good place to start.

With no competition holding game publishers in check, they are free to peddle mediocre-to-bad products that emphasize glorified gambling-casino mechanics over actual gameplay or compelling features like franchise or dynasty modes.

Maybe College Football 25 will prove to be an exception to this rule, though, for a little while at least. In its effort to bring back the genre and celebrate the passion that so many fans — young and old — have for college football gaming, it sounds like EA’s new game may be an oasis in the overall desert of 2020s-era sports gaming (which EA played a large role in creating).

Barring major structural changes to the industry — which may be coming anyway — there’s probably nothing that can reverse the long-term decline of sports games since the mid-2000s. But that doesn’t mean we can’t at least try to enjoy a game that temporarily brings back the spirit of what made sports gaming great those many years ago.

---

Filed under: College Football, Video Games

1. Players were paid a fee of $600 (plus a free copy of the game) if they opted into having their NIL used in the game.

2. Excluding handhelds; sorry, Nintendo DS and PSP users.

3. Games that were released on multiple consoles only count once apiece, so there are not separate entries for, say, NHL 2004 on the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube.