Once upon a time, you could play almost any major professional sport on an Xbox or Playstation. You could also play NCAA sports like basketball and football for many years. There was even more than one company covering each sport as Electronic Arts and 2K Games each had a version of certain sports. In 2019, however, this no longer the case. Besides basketball, those two major companies no longer produce games in the same sport. Also good luck in finding a recent NCAA football game as both companies stopped making that series.
Worst of these companies also stopped producing the professional sport of baseball on all the consoles. The only way to experience the realistic sport of baseball on a console is to play either the Show on the PS4 or the substandard RBI Baseball series. In fact, Xbox One users like myself get snubbed pretty hard when it comes to baseball! For example, went Friday to a game store to buy a baseball game since the season has started. Sadly, it was an exercise in futility.
The store has a sale where you can buy 2 games at $7.95 or under and get one game free. This presented a problem as the only baseball game for the Xbox One there was used and still $19. Thus, the store clerk had the idea to try to find sports games on the Xbox 360 that would work on the Xbox One. This idea showed promised as the Xbox 360 has many more sports games including baseball and many were under $7.95. To simply matters further, the clerk gave me the entire list of Xbox 360 games that can also be played on the Xbox One. Well, that was the closest it got to actually working anyway as none of the baseball games on the Xbox 360 are Xbox One!
Coupling the lack of baseball on all consoles with the horrid reviews of major sports games such as Madden 19 and NBA 2K19, it’s not hard to see that the genre has seen better days. For myself, the one saving grace has been the new MUT mode in Madden 2019. Despite the negative and rather nasty user reviews of the game, Madden Ultimate Team has been a blast to play the past two weeks or so!
It’s a shame that these games seem to get worse and worse. But I’m still a big fan of Madden.
Sports video games aren’t all that bad, especially if you haven’t played one at all or played one in years. It’s mainly just that they’re “oversaturated”. For instance, why should I get FIFA 21, if I have FIFA 20? I think annual releases of sports video games are the main problem, because there’s usually not much to get excited about between one installment and the next installment.