Gameitall 
If you are an avid sports gamer, I’m sure you’ve done the same. Neglect a game in 2016 because you were playing something else you liked/loved. That is where the problem is: everyone had a game like that last year. Madden, NHL, MLB The Show, FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, NBA 2K, Out of the Park Baseball, Franchise Hockey Manager, they are all great games and games worthy of everyone’s attention, but I have 5 or 6 games on that list that I feel I didn’t play enough, or at all, in 2016. Games were so good in 2016 that people broke out of their seasonal patterns to keep playing them.
MLB The Show switching to a yearly release for their popular ‘Diamond Dynasty’ mode is what complicated things for me personally. I have seen others say they play more Madden Connected Franchise this year because of improvements like ‘Play The Moments’. People are still playing FIFA by the millions, NHL is a vastly improved game which has brought back some of it’s disenfranchised base. So many games are on the same level in terms of quality that it makes it hard to decide which one to play. Take a quick look on Metacritic: NBA, NHL, MLB, Madden, FIFA, and PES, all within 10 points of one another in Metascore for PS4. There isn’t a bad game on the list, nor a game that has separated itself from the pack as excellent.
Sales of sports video games are on the rise, just as they were in 2015 and 2014. Heck, FIFA 17 has the potential to surpass 10 million copies sold on PS4 this year, but at what point does that sales bubble burst? At what point do customers start scaling back the number of sports games they purchase so they can focus on the few that have taken their interest? Nobody knows the answer to those questions, but devs can’t risk being left holding the bag. I don’t personally think that 2017 will show any kind of sales decline for video games, but sales won’t keep growing at the rate they have in recent years, they will taper back eventually.
The key hitch for a lot of these games are the revenue source of card collecting modes which have become a staple of sports titles and have brought millions of dollars in additional revenue to game companies. The more people playing your game and playing said modes have the potential to make your bottom line look better and better with each pack ripped.
MLB The Show’s team took a gamble this year and decided to support their card collecting mode year-round, and it paid off. If MLB 17 were to take a step backwards, and people started transitioning to typical late-summer, early-fall games like FIFA, Madden, NHL and NBA, the MLB show team would be giving back their gains made, and forced to re-evaluate their plans for the mode and the game moving forward.
The other wildcard in this is Out of the Park Developments, makers of Out of the Park Baseball and Franchise Hockey Manager, two fantastic simulation-based PC games. These games are ever-growing in popularity, sales and quality (with OOTP Baseball earning PC Game of the Year honors on Metacritic) and while these mostly text-based options will never truly replace standard sports games, they are just as good, if not better than some of the sports games I’ve talked about in this piece. In fact, OOTP Baseball 17 just broke past 100,000 sales for the first time in the game’s history.
So, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, developers need to step up their game. With so many titles on the cusp of greatness, companies will be putting in extra hours to try to get their game there first. Some might, and some might not, but it’s the journey and the effort that I feel will make 2017 another fantastic year for sports gamers, maybe the best year ever, but only time will tell.
