Are sports games a dying genre? With the cancellation of the MLB Range, Games such as NHL 2k11 and NCAA Basketball 11 taking a time of to 'rethink the strategy'. The buying figures for these have declined in recent years, that's why the MLB range hit the can and soon may others. Does anyone else see this as a dying genre? Only sports I can think of which are doing well are Soccer and American Football (Ergo Madden 11/NCAA 11 and Fifa 11), will it soon be these are the only two published sports?
This is what happens when one company buys an exclusive license to make games based on the major league sports (MLB, NCAA, NHL, NFL, etc.). No one wants to buy a non-licensed game, so there are less of them and no reason for the "yearly updates" to be truly innovative since there is no competition.
I was dreaming of the day when all sports games would be dead when I was a kid. I really hate sports unless I m actually playing them. Its boring to watch, let alone play as a game of a game on your TV. Unfortunately, there will always be people like you who will buy sports games and thus the genre will always have a guaranteed following in the millions, don't worry.
Funny how developers screw up the one genre of games that is perfect for an annual $10-$15 DLC update. Then again as long as people are stupid enough to throw down $50-$70 each year for what is essentially a roster update can you really blame them?
Looks like one to me. Anyways sports games are pretty much pointless IMO. Don't know why so many people play them.
The problem with the sports genre is that most of the games start to die as soon as they're released. The companies, be it EA, Konami, 2K Sports or any other, start to forget their own game to focus on the next one. I know the "new" versions might have some graphical updates, new modes, but it's essentially a roster update. The "game" is the same. This means people will pay full retail price for a game that will be dead and left out in less than a year! They should at least keep a 2 year support for bug fixes and roster updates.
The problem is that with each new generation of console the sports games get a year or two where they take full advantage of the new hardware and are usually half decent because they bring a lot of new stuff to the table . Its once the year or two is over and they can't do any more to the games to make them that much better when you start to get mainly roster updates and not much more. The first Fifa game i got on the 360 was 09 and i doubt i wil get any others because i find the game good and didn't see the point in wasting £30-40 to get Fifa 10 when it wasn't going to be that much better than 09 and i certainly won't get 11 again because it won't be that different. When the next Xbox, PS4..etc come out i'll probably wait a few of years before picking up another Fifa that way i avoid the early version which will suck and i get the last version to have any major updates which will suit me.
I dont really play many sports games, but i would go absolutely apeshit without nhl 10 ( nor 09 the year before it, or 08 before that, and so on) to play. While most sports series are just roster updates, there are exceptions that add to the game and improve it every year, and the NHL series ( ea's nhl series) is one of them. Are they a dying genre?? Not a chance. I know plenty of people who play ONLY sports games, and now that i think about it, i dont know anyone ho doesnt have at least 1 sports game. EDIT: Holy shit!!! post 1000!!!!
Sports games are here to stay, although the number of different types of sports games has dried up a bit... Most sports seem to what the Americans like so American Football, Ice Hockey, Golf, Tennis, Baseball are well represented. Football thankfully is popular in europe and Japan so we at least get a number of football games. Outside of this then it is a little weak, EA seemed to have given up on Rugby with the last release being 3 years ago, the former studios are working on a game for 2012 but that is a good year away at least.... One problem about most sports games is that they haven't really improved gameplay wise for a while, playing Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast and the last version on say the Xbox 360 shows very little improvement on the game. Games like Snooker were perfected back in the Amiga days with Jimmy Whites Snooker and there is little you can do to improve it... Although thinking about it most FPS games haven't really improved much in the last few years... Psuedo sports like skateboarding have had some improvements mainly due to competition and activision at least tried to improve TH by making a new add on. As skavenger216 said (of sorts) everyone owns at least one sports game, even Yakumo has more then most people here
Speaking of sports games, is FIFA still even king of the hill? From what I could tell, Winning 11 was getting super popular.
To address the question in the subject directly, it's worth remembering that the very first video game was a rudimentary sports game simulation. I think that every multiplayer game could be construed as a sport of some kind. As a genre, and as a mechanism to define how we play, sports and video games are firmly and irreversibly intertwined. Of course, that's not the intent of the question. What we're all dancing around here in this thread is whether or not there's value in representing professional sports in video games. And it's evident from the polarized responses that the answer really depends on how much you actually care about professional sporting events and whether or not you're a fan. So in that sense, it's really like any other game genre. As long as there are fans, there'll be a market for the games, regardless of quality or quantity. That's not to say there's no possibility of crossover. I was not a fan of the American football until I tried NFL2K, and then I got hooked on the simulation aspect of the games. I found the motion capture and AI advances paved the way for progress everywhere else in the game industry. But it also put me at an unfair advantage, in that I would wait for the bargain used copies because I didn't care about roster changes or fidelity to current rules. I think the only new copy of a sports game I bought was the NFL2K5 for the Xbox, and that was because it was $20 at launch.
If people were smart they would be (a dying genre). I have one football game (NFL2k1). Thats all I need if I want to play football. Though Franchise Mode does eventually get weird. I'm currently in the year 2025 and it seems that the Ortiz, Wilkerson, Strickland, and Roy bloodlines were pumping out a lot of future football players in the late 90s...
It was? Looks more like a MilSim to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game Back on topic, here's my opinion: If I want sports, I go outside. I play video games because they let me do things I couldn't do in real life. Dangerous and/or expensive sports like racing are a gray area, but baseball, football/soccer, football/handegg etc. in video game form are something the world doesn't need.
Don't lazily quote liepedia as evidence of the first game, the first documented computer / video games were more family parlour games, like draughts, nim, chess and naughts and crosses. Just because you could go outside and play most of these games doesn't mean everyone can and you are forgetting that it's a game, it's meant to be fun, yes playing football is fun, but so is playing Winning Eleven or Fifa. You could join the army and shoot real terrorists but the chances are you would play something like call of duty... before you say that that would be dangerous, playing sports is dangerous, i hurt my ankle in a kick about yesterday...
I don't dispute your preference there, but can you summon 21 friends at a moment's notice to play four quarters of regulation American football? A video game simulation of the same act serves a different need. Also, there's the small problem that for some of us, going outside to play also requires an elevator ride and a train transfer. It's not that we can't play baseball in real life, but that it's increasingly inconvenient to do so. Also, there are very few opportunities in a non-virtual world to share a field with Barry Sanders.
