Too Many Maddens: The Awful State of Sports Sims in Gaming

The biggest scam in all of gaming history is the scam that continues to this day without much resistance, even if its impact and profitability isn’t quite as strong as it used to be.

We’re of course talking about the genre of sports simulators.

We’re talking about the Maddens, the Shows, and the NBA 2Ks.

The video game industry is chock full of excellent content of many shapes, sizes, and prices. Thanks to technology, better understanding overall of the medium, and the amount of money that’s now involved, we see video games in smartphones, computers, laptops, tablets, as well as from the usual powerful machines from the Big 3 (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft). So of course in such a big industry, there are very sketchy corners within that manipulates the market and takes advantage of the customers. And man, the sports simulator has gotten away with way too much for way too long.

Why do they still to this day keep making yearly editions of all their games when gaming has progressed enough to be able to fix anything with downloadable patches and be able to enhance the game using the same method? Super Mario Maker 2 got three massive updates in a couple years and went from you creating and sharing levels to being able to create your very own Super Mario adventure with up to 40 levels uploaded for anyone to play. Take the controversial Cyberpunk 2077, which was so severely unfinished that their sales were paused until things improved----and surely enough weeks later patches arrived to fix most of the mistakes.

So why aren’t we demanding this from our sports simulators? And what makes it worse is that our options to begin with are extremely bare.

EA has an expensive stranglehold on the European soccer and the NFL market, with 2K finally this year after multiple generations of banishment being allowed to make NFL games, but they cannot be simulators. Then there’s Konami who still can’t use every European soccer club because FIFA owns the rights (ugh). In the meantime, the baseball simulator market finally expanded after essentially generations of Sony having the exclusive advantage with The Show, to a point in which MLB noticed the lack of popularity in games might be connected to the younger crowd not as invested in the real thing as much as they desire.

EA, kings of bullshit and everything wrong with gaming, has pretty much made it extremely difficult for anyone else to make sports simulators, and so therefore they have more leeway towards punishing their customers with microtransactions and sometimes even just copying-and-pasting the same game and updating the year and charging full price (look at FIFA on the Switch, its an embarrassment). So you whether have to put up with EA and 2K (whose NBA 2K series is good…but…has been lackluster from time to time), or just move on to arcade sports with fake teams and fictional athletes like Super Mario in Mario Tennis Aces or your created player in Super Mega Baseball 3.

But why is there a Madden game every year? Why is there an NBA 2K game every year?

Literally, every single year?

Whether it’s the smaller franchises like RBI Baseball or PES Soccer, they all create yearly editions, and simply update the rosters while fix up gameplay issues of the past and then maybe offer up one or two new modes (that….also may have existed in the past before removal). But this is unacceptable, especially when they charge full price for the same game every single year. Why are we continuing to allow this? ALL these franchises can easily offer $15-$25 patches to update rosters and fix bugs and maybe even make enhancements, but they instead go for the yearly $60-$70 full game option.

These actions are extremely anti-consumer, and simply taking advantage of the shortage of sports simulators in the market altogether. Even though Call of Duty does come out with a game every year, at the very least they each contain a different single-player campaign and/or implements new arenas and rules and battles when multi-player is being utilized. But unless the sport in the real world undergoes massive changes, the same cannot and will not be said for your Maddens or your The Shows. Why not offer patches?

On a legal standpoint, nothing much we can do with these anti-consumer practices and legal monopolies. The best way to challenge this dated and awful concept of releasing the same game every year is to stop buying their product. Poor sales will make the necessary noise to make changes, or at the very least force them to create better product for us to purchase. Boycotting Madden and FIFA would be extremely difficult, especially to the diehard fans of the sports themselves and to those whose content creation relies on playing these games (the Twitch streamers and YouTubers), but in the end it would give us a better game in the future.

NFL 2K5 released back in 2004 has MORE features than modern-day Madden games (while also being $30 cheaper), and to this very day people still play this XBox/PS2 masterpiece. I can guarantee you that nobody today plays a Madden game from the XBox 360/PS3 era, and once the next edition comes up the previous game becomes immediately forgotten. The gaming industry has seen excellent improvements in nearly every single category imaginable, we are seeing excellent innovative games from all genres. We are seeing video games that can tell lengthy engrossing stories with more content than entire mini-series on Netflix, we are seeing games that years after its release is still being explored for secrets and surprises (Breath of the Wild).

So why are sports games stuck in the past with outdated sales techniques, microtransactions, and still with less gameplay diversity than games over a decade and a half old?

Because the near monopolizing of the licensing of the athletes, teams, and leagues are allowing for these companies to make mediocre games and continue screwing over consumers.

We haven’t had a memorable sports simulator in years, and that’s not counting the INfamous disaster known as the NBA Live games. We deserve better, the industry deserves better, and we should be demanding much better content from these companies that are more focused on profit over actually improving the games they make. What EA did to the FIFA franchise on the Nintendo Switch should be illegal, and should have cost them millions.

But sadly, until the gaming community shuts their wallets collectively, companies like EA, Konami, and 2K will continue to prevent the much-needed evolution of sports simulators in gaming.