The Silent Powerhouses Behind the Gaming Industry
At the 2025 DICE Awards, amidst the usual fanfare and self-congratulations, something noteworthy happened. Sony’s Ramone Russell took the stage to accept MLB The Show 24’s award for Best Sports Game. Nothing unusual there—another year, another sports game victory. But then, Russell said something that should make every gamer and game developer pause and think.
“Sports games are the reason other games get greenlit.”
Now, that’s a statement that deserves some unpacking.
Why Sports Games Keep the Industry Alive
Sports games exist in a strange space in the gaming world. They don’t get the same artistic prestige as indie masterpieces. They aren’t showered with the same fanfare as open-world RPGs or cinematic blockbusters. Yet, without them, a massive portion of the industry would crumble.
These games are a guaranteed revenue stream—consistent, predictable, and lucrative. They’re the reliable workhorses that fund riskier, more experimental projects. Think about it: without the annual revenue from FIFA (now EA Sports FC), would EA be as willing to gamble on games like Star Wars: Jedi Survivor? Without NBA 2K, could Take-Two afford to pour years into Grand Theft Auto VI?
Ramone Russell laid it out clearly: “If your sports game is good, and it’s coming out every year, and you have these fans that are supporting it, it allows for us and other companies to greenlight other games that wouldn’t have been made.”
Translation? These yearly franchises don’t just survive in the industry; they sustain it.
The Unseen Effort Behind Every Annual Release
Critics love to roll their eyes at sports games. “It’s just a roster update.” “Same game, new number on the cover.” But that’s a lazy take. The level of engineering, physics simulation, and AI innovation in sports games is staggering—often years ahead of what’s seen in other genres.
Take MLB The Show 24, for example. Creating realistic, motion-captured animations for hundreds of players? That alone is a technological feat. But then consider the physics engine that has to calculate every pitch, every swing, every ball movement in real-time. This isn’t just a game—it’s a highly sophisticated sports simulator.
And yet, the work is often invisible. “A lot of these sports games are the reason why other games get greenlit,” Russell said, but what’s left unsaid is how much work goes into them. These games must be rebuilt every year, all while maintaining an insane level of polish. There’s no luxury of a five-year development cycle.
The Double-Edged Sword of Success
Of course, not all studios manage to pull this off. Look no further than EA’s latest struggles with EA Sports FC 24. Just weeks before Russell’s comments, EA was forced to admit that their flagship soccer game had underperformed. “Global Football had experienced two consecutive fiscal years of double-digit net bookings growth,” the company reported, “However, the franchise experienced a slowdown as early momentum in the fiscal third quarter did not sustain through to the end.”
Translation: FIFA was printing money, but now EA’s scrambling because they assumed that would never change.
This is the problem with annualized sports games. When they succeed, they prop up an entire company. When they fail, the financial blow is enormous. And, in EA’s case, that failure often leads to layoffs—because when a company that makes billions in profit has a bad quarter, it’s always the workers who pay the price.
When Sports Games Become More Than Just Games
MLB The Show has been a moneymaker for Sony for years, but what makes it stand out isn’t just financial—it’s cultural. In 2023, Sony San Diego introduced a mode dedicated to The Negro Leagues, the early-20th century baseball leagues that housed Black players barred from the major leagues due to segregation.
This wasn’t just a throwaway feature. Sony San Diego built an entire narrative-driven experience, complete with documentary-style storytelling. Ramone Russell himself admitted, “We needed to be able to tell a story [with this game mode] because 95 percent of our audience has no idea what the heck the Negro Leagues are.”
And that’s the thing about sports games. They aren’t just digital recreations of the real world. When done right, they can be educational, cultural time capsules. They can tell stories that would otherwise go ignored.
The Backbone of the Industry
The next time someone complains that sports games are just re-skinned cash grabs, remind them that without these games, the industry would be in serious trouble. They aren’t flashy. They aren’t groundbreaking in the way that an Elden Ring or a Baldur’s Gate 3 is. But they are necessary.
Because as long as there are sports fans, these games will sell. And as long as they sell, developers will have the financial breathing room to take risks elsewhere.
So, if you enjoyed any big-budget, experimental, or high-concept game in the last decade, you might just have a sports game to thank for it.
