One of the subjects I never expected to be excited about this year is sports games. This is partly because I’ve become bored with the genre in past years, because it feels like there’s only so many ways you can innovate a professional sport.
Graphical improvements have become a necessity, as well as new ways to design career modes—but beyond that there’s not a whole lot that has kept me interested in past years.
Another reason I never expected I’d be interested in sports games is because sports have changed drastically in the past year, and the uncertainty of a normal season has disrupted my interest.
But three stories these past weeks have changed that, and I’d like to break down why these stories have once again piqued my interest in sports games.
MLB The Show 21 finds a new home on Xbox
One of the craziest gaming stories I’ve been following these past few weeks is the announcement that MLB The Show 21 will be released this spring on the Xbox family of consoles.
It’s strange to be surprised by a sports game releasing on Xbox, but The Show has been a staple of the PlayStation ecosystem for years. It’s developed by Sony’s San Diego Studio, and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, so it has always made sense to be a PlayStation exclusive.
Not only is it the first time The Show has been released on a console other than PlayStation—in fact, this is the first time a AAA Major League Baseball game has been released on Xbox in more than eight years—but it might be the first occurrence of Sony actively publishing a title for a competitor’s console.
That’s why The Show’s announcement is exciting to me. It’s not just about new players getting to enjoy this specific game, but instead it’s about the potential for Sony to branch out and release more titles on Microsoft platforms—something it’s also experimenting with by developing titles for PC.
The return of College Football
Another interesting story in the sports genre is the announcement that EA Sports will be returning to college football over the next few years as EA Sports College Football.
Not much is known about this title at the moment, except that EA will not be including the likeness of players or their names. Instead, EA Sports will be working with the Collegiate Licensing Company to include the uniforms, stadiums and traditions of more than 100 NCAA football teams.
But EA Sports doesn’t actually need to use the likeness of college players to bring me back to the franchise. All they really need to focus on is creating a connected ecosystem between College Football and Madden.
That’s why I was always drawn to the franchise. I never had a huge interest in football, but I was fascinated by the way EA could experiment with collegiate sports games to influence the experience of their “main” professional sports franchises.
One of my fondest memories of NCAA Football was being able to create a player at the university level and spend the weeks leading up to Madden’s release tweaking my player and ultimately drafting them in the first round of the NFL Draft.
Cross-platform multiplayer
MLB The Show 21’s Xbox announcement was so big I had to talk about it twice. Once to highlight the importance of the announcement itself and another to talk about cross-platform multiplayer in The Show 21.
The Show is the first major licensed sports game to ever include cross-platform multiplayer between Xbox and PlayStation consoles. And that’s a huge deal, because cross-platform play is still a fairly new experience in the history of the “console wars” for any game.
Sony is setting a precedent with MLB The Show 21 that sports games shouldn’t be exclusive and if this trend continues and more franchises move to cross-platform multiplayer, the experience will be better for all gamers.
The time where gamers had to choose between playing on their favourite console or playing with their friends is ending, and that will ultimately create a better marketplace for games.
