The Sports Game in Today's Video Game Market: A Few Thoughts

Like just about everything else the world of video games has fragmented so that "big picture" views of what is going on in it have become more elusive (certainly, in comparison with what we had a few decades ago), with one aspect of this I recently found myself looking at sports games. To go by the annual bestseller lists at least some sports games still sell very well--as with Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series. However, my impression is that there has still been some slippage in their old prominence, at least to go by the press coverage, and the games that seem to have real pop cultural cachet--all of which seems to favor action-adventure, especially where there is a massively multiplayer or role-playing element (as with hits from Fortnite to Elden Ring).

What quantitative evidence I have been able to find supports that conclusion. Way back in the 8-bit era, for instance, sports games were very prominent in the ranks of all-time big-sellers. According to the list compiled at Wikipedia there were motocross and golf games (and of course, Duck Hunt) in the list of the top ten sellers on the Nintendo Entertainment System that dominated gaming in its era, and baseball and track and boxing in the top twenty. If making for an imperfect comparison, it still seems telling that the NPD market research company's tracking listed no sports games whatsoever in the top ten in 2000-2009, with the four in the top twenty occupying ranks 13 and below--and all of them from the Madden NFL series--while even these failed to make their list of the top twenty in 2010-2019 even once. In 2020 and 2021 Madden again made the list, but in the #3 and #4 spots, respectively, with any other sports games, especially barring a gimmick like a connection with a popular non-sports franchise (like Super Mario, in the Mario Kart series), apt to be few and far between, even when we consider the most popular franchises and sports.

Considering the matter all this seems to track with what we have seen culturally. The cultural profile of professional sports has fallen significantly from what it was a few decades ago, with younger cohorts--who are so important to the gaming market--less likely to take an interest in the enjoyment of spectator sports than their elders. At the same time, compared with how things stood in the '80s, gamers have more options--and a more fragmented culture--which means that those whose interest in sports is only marginal or nonexistent are less likely to try a sports game (as compared with that generation of 8-bit players whose more limited selection had pretty much everyone playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out or Blades of Steel at some point). In the process the profile of sports within gaming fell just as it did in the entertainment world-popular culture more broadly, with it a telling fact that only the best-established franchises associated with the biggest sports have managed to stay presences, as newer franchises fail to materialize and those sports outside the first rank of popularity with TV audiences fall by the wayside here--such that it seems almost unthinkable that a golf game will be a top ten seller on any major system in the 2020s, all as, barring some really surprising turnabout, I would not be at all surprised to see sports games entirely fail to make this decade's top twenty as well.