Why we can't have nice things: The death of creativity in sports video games

The Golden Age Of Sports Games

When studios learned how important having player likenesses and authentic teams actually was to creating a sports game, licensing exploded. In the mid-90s, you couldn't sneeze without getting some on a licensed game, from Ken Griffey's Baseball, to Coach K's College Basketball, to Manchester United Championship Soccer, and yes, the behemoth that is the Madden franchise.

The market was saturated, yes, but in the early-90's into early-00's, the fact that licenses were relatively easy to obtain meant that competition drove studios to make better, more creative games. This is how arcade-style sports games like NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and others were born. Out of a need to compete with simulation-style sports games, game studios attempted to do something different -- altering the rules of the sport itself in order to create a more arcade-like experience and adding in unique touches to set the game apart. These games were borne of necessity as much as they were borne of creativity, as the video games market was rapidly expanding and as such, game developers risked getting left behind if they didn't create something worthwhile.

This also meant that studios that didn't have licenses had to work extra hard to make their games stand apart. Mutant League Football, the original Backyard Baseball, and countless other games (including a whole bunch of sports games where you played as robots in space), not only succeeded in standing alone as great games in their own right, but also pushed the officially licensed games to do more.

The Licensing Crunch

It's likely that your favorite sports game came from that era, released sometime between the early '90s and mid-2000s, and the reason for that is simple. In the mid-2000s, there were 2 main simulation-style NFL games out there: the ESPN 2K series, and Madden. After ESPN 2K5 released in 2004 at a lower price point than the inferior Madden 2005 game, EA Sports essentially bought out the NFL, and inked a deal that would ensure that games in the Madden series would be the only ones to bear the official NFL license.

At the same time, sports leagues were starting to notice how ubiquitous video games were becoming. They started to notice the little things in games -- ones that they felt reflected poorly on the sports leagues themselves. From neutering the fighting in NHL games, to the elbow-drops in NFL Blitz, and even removing that ambulance in the Madden games that would run your players over sometimes, the leagues wanted to limit this content that they found objectionable. This meant that as the video gaming market itself was growing at an alarming rate, licenses were a whole lot harder to come by. Goodbye, sweet ambulance. We hardly knew you.

Licensed Games Today

Given the timing of the video games boom and the crunch in licensing, it's no surprise that between the late-00's and today, major sports licenses are held only by major developers with huge teams and budgets. Given the state of the market, it makes sense for sports leagues to treat these games as commercials for themselves. This essentially reverses the original purpose of the license -- it's not being used to sell the games, the license is being used by the game to sell the league.

Compounding this problem is the fact that licenses today are almost exclusively held by huge studios, meaning they are more beholden to stakeholders and outside influences than the small development teams of the past. Creativity is necessarily dangerous, because so much time and money goes into these games now. It's cost-effective (and honestly, smart) to keep changes iterative, not step outside the box, and keep the leagues and gamers satisfied as opposed to taking chances, being creative, and risking alienating the league or your fans on the off chance the game underperforms. There's also very little competition between studios today in terms of licensed games, so there's very little impetus to push forward and try something new.

It's all so cloyingly, suffocatingly safe. And that emphasis on safety is why we'll never really get a true NFL Blitz game again. Sure, it's good for business -- at least for now -- but it makes for games that, while they may be objectively good, are not as good as they could (or should) be.