I found myself playing a ton of sports games last month--it's the time of year most of them come out--and it has absolutely done me in.
I played some Madden 25, NBA 2K25, EA Sports FC 25 and eFootball. All of these have things in common, shared horrors that overlap, season passes and packets of cards and menu screens that implore you to spend real money on both, like some venn diagram for the damned. But the predatory economics of these games are well-known, and quite frankly, I'm tired of talking about them.
What really struck me this year, playing through all four games together and so close to each other, is that I have fond memories of all four. Madden 2002, for example, was incredible, and gave me one of the most profound sports game experiences I have ever had, when I created myself as a QB in career mode, dropped back in the pocket for my first pass and heard the commentator actually say "Plunkett". I knew logically that he was just pulling the name from the disc because Jim Plunkett was included in the game as a classic QB, but still. In the early 2000s this felt like witchcraft, and was a big reason I spent hundreds of hours playing the game.
The NBA 2K series definitely hit a peak in the late 2010s. Not only did it play like a truly modern basketball game, it had genuine singleplayer aspirations, including a lavish (if also regularly embarrassing) storyline, which as a guy who predominantly played offline was really appreciated. FIFA and PES (as eFootball was previously known), meanwhile, have been with me for decades. PES was THE game for anyone into football in the 2000s, and FIFA had it bookended in the 90s and 2010s with its commitment to accessibility, flash and bombast.
In 2024, those memories of old games aren't as distant as I would have hoped.
Not much has changed across all four games, despite all the years gone by. All four games were stale. Like I was playing something that looked new on the surface, but which was based on a set of underlying systems and feel that are years, and in some cases decades old. Sure, the intervening years have added flashier crowd visuals and better TV-like presentation, extra frames of animation and some bouncier collisions, but Madden's on-field experience--the weight of the game, the way runners bounce off blockers, the interactions between a receiver, a defensive back and a flying ball--aren't that different from 2002.
It's the same with NBA 2K25. The publisher can claim a "next-gen" version has been available for a few years now, but while I appreciate that some rough edges have been sanded off and the lighting looks lovely, my 2024 hoops experience is alarmingly similar to my 2014 experience. EA Sports FC 25's big-shouldered player models, slippery movement and sluggish ball physics can be traced back to the 2010s. eFootball, on life support since Konami practically gave up competing with EA a few years back, plays like I'm opening a time capsule buried in 2018.
For the longest time "gamers" who didn't play (or didn't understand the appeal of) sports games have mocked the genre, saying "you're just paying for the same game with new rosters". And for the longest time, that simply wasn't true! If you played FIFA 98, FIFA 2004 then FIFA 2009 you would have been playing three vastly different games. The jump between Madden 96 and Madden 03 was immense. As consoles leapt from the 32 to 64-bit era and beyond, every few years and every new generation would bring what at the time felt like a revolutionary new way to play your favourite sports games.
Now, though, we live in the age of diminishing returns, and advances have slowed to a crawl, to the point where players can see and feel similarities in games that aren't just years apart, but decades. Part of this is down to the increasing costs and complexity of development, sure, but things are not helped by exclusivity deals robbing most of these games of their primary competition. I's no coincidence that FIFA and Madden had to be at their best when PES and NFL 2K were nipping at their heels, competition that has been all but removed thanks to EA signing deals with bodies like the NFL and Premier League.
The state of things is such that I find myself, once a victim of those "it's the same game every year!" taunts, now in the weird position where I'm still getting people saying that to me while I'm also joining in. I look at all four of the games I've just played and sigh heavily, not just at their dated gameplay but the way each of them is now increasingly overrun with casino-like microtransactions.
It's all such a huge bummer. These are some of the richest games in the world, released by some of the biggest publishers, with more resources than most other studios could even dream of. There's surely the talent and the horsepower to make something truly modern, a reimagining of what it means to play a sports video game on a contemporary console or PC. Yet, in a microcosm of tech's wider malaise, all EA and 2K seem to be interested in is releasing the same thing every year and just loading it up with more and more bullshit.
