Madden and the future of sports gaming

A step in a direction, maybe

Gaming and sports don't sound like they should mix. In fact, they literally sound like water and oil slipping off each other and never crossing into the same gravitational pull as one another. And then I remember the existence of Esports and my analogy starts to unravel, but I'm going to put that segment of gaming to the side for a bit. (No offence to E-athletes and all the dedication they put into their craft, but I just don't know enough about them to give them a fair shake in this discussion right now.) There seems to be a actualisation of that feeling, that gaming and sports don't mix, in that most every single major sports themed video game is a godawful grift attempt made by soulless businessmen puppeteering a catatonic development team.  

Now first I need to belabour the point that I'm talking about 'major' sports video games; as there are plenty of smaller efforts by actual talented creators that are fun and silly to try out. Heck, I would never dream of besmirching the good name of the Blood Bowl series by including it in the same breath as one of EA's sports franchises, that's about the line in the sand I want to draw as my distinction. When you get to the actual 'simulation games', the licences for which are all jealously guarded by the industry elite, you find yourself in a whirlpool of mediocrity spinning downwards and put with enough flurry and activity that, should you not be paying attention, one might think there's some sort of forward progression in these franchises. Let's collectively dispel that shoddy illusion right now, shall we? There is none, there never will be progression, now whilst the sports game public remain complacent to being fed actual faeces.

But how can I say that? Haven't I see the shiny graphics? The updated models? The extensive in-depth videos of the new Madden's touch-sense, or play sense, or whatever vague marketing gimmick they want to try and wave in your face as a new feature. Like writing a single sentence and parading it around like you've made serious head-way; only doing that for years on a multimillion dollar franchise. These are just spinning wheels. Have you noticed how every year the big standout feature is always something to do with AI or controls? Something esoteric where the team can simply say that the AI is 'better' or the controls are 'tighter' and as long as they feel even the slightest bit different to the last game you have to concede that something was done behind the scenes. But is anything actually being done? Does Madden have an actual fully employed development staff?

Year after year we see evidence to the contrary; and this recent Madden release has been no different. With screenshots of posters for events that happened in the real world more than two years ago, the exact same rotation of selectable heads in the character creator that has been around for more than half a decade now, tons of visually identical assets as have been used for the past 8 or so years during the last generation of consoles; and so many logic bugs it's incredible to think this is a game that has been slightly touched up and tweaked by the staff for all of their professional lives in some cases. In fact, this year's Madden has been so bad that you've got the actual players tweeting about their feelings on the bugginess; and those are the guys that get paid to promote that crap!

So, surprised Pikachu face abounds; this year's Madden is a mess. Although that pill is an especially foul one given that this year's entry was dedicated to the founder of the franchise himself, John Madden, after he passed away. Which actually makes this the second sports game in recent memory to try and take advantage of the death of a celebrity in order to sell their sub-par product more. Seriously, how do people actually defend this with a straight face? Surely there has to come a point where you look around and realise that you are being screwed over; the company is treating you as their Guinea pigs to see what they can get away pulling off on the rest of the industry, and buying the next game without thinking is only ensuring the status quo will remain.

The only thing that surprises me is that Madden had no NFTs- and that... well that's actually something interesting, wouldn't you say? I do not idly claim that Sports games are the testing grounds for what games companies want to pull on the rest of their fans, we've seen that play out before us with season passes, lootboxes and online-only DRM. So isn't it fascinating that amidst all Madden got wrong; they didn't include any NFT functionality at all? Even after saying that the future of Fifa and Madden was in NFTs just about a year before the new Madden's release? What could have possibly happened in the interim to sour such a staunch and headstrong impression- oh right, the worldwide crypto market fell off by actual orders of magnitude...

So if we use the sports gaming industry and it's lack of integrity as a dowsing rod to judge how the waters of the industry are flowing (Is that how dowsing rods work? I've seriously got no clue.) we can ascertain that the NFT future has fallen off dramatically, and that this pull-out happened so abruptly that EA and it's like couldn't implement a replacement scheme; because currently this year's Madden doesn't look to do anything worse than it's predecessor aside from be buggy. And less there's some bubbling scheme from game's developers to make their games intentionally unplayable for... some reason... I supposed we'll just have to take this year as a win of convivence. The needle isn't getting pushed into our face once again. Or, we just won't see the next scheme coming because EA will use it's main industry as test-tube-animals in a dry trial run...

To call the future of Sports gaming a future at is to bury the lead. Many will point out that Sport Games are still going through the agonising process of slowly reading a bunch of the features they had before the great reset of the generation before last. Whereas what I want to tell you is much the opposite; they're adding a feature here and quietly phasing one out there so that they can go around in circles in this neverending game of incremental updates forever more. If any company were so inclined, and they are obviously currently not, they could create a single 'Warzone' style football game that is updates entirely within the provided software and players would enjoy the exact same level of innovation between console generations. If things are moving that slowly, you might want to stay confronting why exactly it is you need the newest sports game at all. Simple, you don't. But if you've read this far then I'm just preaching to the choir.

Stupid Delivery?

Breaking news: Water, wet?

So the Inside Xbox Series X gameplay reveal event hit us last week and the Internet came away with one prevailing thought; "That wasn't gameplay! RIOT". Personally, I didn't really care that much because I'm not honestly sure what sort of amazing things one would expect from gameplay trailers for games that are built to run on both new gen and current gen consoles. (What are you looking for? Higher resolution? Smoother frames? None of those really translate well over streamed video anyway so what are we really missing out on?) But for me the real take away was the new consumer friendly practise that Microsoft were blazing a trail on (and hopefully setting an example with) known as Smart Delivery. This is an idea wherein folk can buy an upcoming game for their current gen consoles and then receive a free upgrade to it's next gen counterpart whenever they are ready to make the jump, saving money and taking a lot of pressure off of the consumer in a really commendable fashion. If only more initiatives like this ruled the gaming world.

For me such an idea is a literal life-saver, as in my current position I'm not really looking at picking up any consoles, next gen or otherwise, for a good many years. (I don't have the kinda cash that early predictions are talking about.) But this, on top of Microsoft's promise that all first party games for the first two years will launch on both gens, makes me feel like I'm not being punished for being a broke POS. (Which is nice) Playstation have been woefully silent on whether or not they have any similar plans so far and the AAA PC marketplace holds practically no scruples when it comes to meeting consumers half way on the hardware they can afford, so this is the sort of positive example we need being set more on our landscape. Of course, it's also the sort of example that a less scrupulous entity could certain adopt and bastardise if they saw fit, on that note: EA everybody!

Save your booing, folks, as today all the EA folk want to do is share in the same good press that everyone else is enjoying. They were present during the event with their sports title which I've already forgotten the name of because all those titles are so homogenised that I refuse to devote even the tiniest part of my memory core to it. Whereas all the other titles with a Smart Delivery system announced so with a snazzy logo at the start of their trailers, 'EA Sports Game: Number 358' had no such logo. Twas' not all for naught, however, as they took the time to get their talking-head sports presenter to talk about a system of free upgrades for purchasers of the current gen game. Okay, so everything's great then, right? But then why didn't EA announce as much with a Smart Delivery tag? What's going on here...

Well it might be time to start your booing again because as it happens EA were being slightly misleading with their messaging here. (I know, big shocker!) The team were piggybacking off of the whole Smart Delivery messaging present in the event to hide their own practises which, while not entirely atrocious, is not of the same calibre as Smart Delivery and really shouldn't be thought of as such. You see, mosey on over to the official website for 'EA Sports Game: Number 358' and you'll see a clarification on this matter. Sure you can buy your copy of the game and then upgrade it completely for free, but only if you buy before December and upgrade before March next year. So you know, far too quickly for the game itself to go down in price or the console. (Which is weird. What, do you have a contract with Microsoft or something, EA, why help their bottom line like this?)

Of course, the intention behind this system in favour of Microsoft's is obvious; they want to draw a deadline under people and allow that to influence their decision making. It's so plain to see that it really makes one marvel at the times when EA comes out to refute their guttered reputation. Their entire identity is founded upon taking every single anticonsumer option that they possible can, and yet they take exception when, said consumers, take an anti-EA stance in kind. Of course, EA want to take a goodwill gesture and twist it into a pressuring device to encourage people to pick up the new Madden game. Of course, they have no scruples about hiding this strategy behind a bevy of trailers that advertise the opposite of this plan. And of course, EA are willing to put themselves in the dog house once more for the vague hope of bumping up sales for a franchise that already has a loyal stable of brainwashed fans that flock to it year after year. (Is the sky blue? Then EA is still EA)

It's just a little surreal to see EA back to their wily ways so darn early into this new generation, and in the face of such overwhelming goodwill. You have multi-million dollar to-be-success stories like CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 agreeing to Smart Delivery, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2, Yakuza Like a Dragon, all games with the legs to shirk Smart Delivery and yet all are taking that plunge just the same. And yet on the other shore you have EA wantonly spitting at their audience and then standing there in bewilderment when that audience spits back. I know I'm hamming on this point but I just seriously do not get it. It makes my brain hurt to even process.

Recently, CDPR made a statement about how nobody should be forced to pay extra for an upgrade to a game, something that rings louder in a time of economic hardship like this year. I'm willing to bet that sales for the next gen are going to be rough for a good-long while as people find themselves needing to spend their money on things just a little more important than video games. It's in times like these that folk who's living depends on providing luxury products should really be looking to make concessions to meet the folk they're dealing with, and Smart Delivery is the absolute bare possible minimum in this regard. And EA couldn't even meet that bare minimum. How sad is that? They tried with their personal upgrade system, but they fell woefully short and into the mud once more.

Of course, once again this won't affect their sales of Madden, and it probably won't even effect EA's reputation; everyone already thinks of the company as scum on our collective shoes anyway. But it does go to shine the spotlight on all the companies who didn't try to worm their way around a simple gesture, so at least EA fell on their sword for the good of their peers, I guess. (I'm sure that's exactly what the team intended to do.) At a stretch I can say that there must be some good influence in EA from the fact that they even offered an upgrade plan at all, but maybe that's even giving them too much credit seeing the way they decided to implement it. Ugh, I'm going around in circles again, (why does talking about EA always do this to me?) I'll just have to do the only thing I can: shake my head and sigh...

The sorry state of the sports-game industry

It's (hardly) in the game.

You know, some of us play video games in order to get away from the exertions that entail with real world sports. Some us are so insecure about our inherent lack of coordination and/or noodle arms that we try to distance our self from our more physically adept brethren as much as possible. "I may lack the upper body strength to pull myself 2 inches up the climbing wall, but when I play as Nathan Drake I can shimmy up that wall like a baboon!" Then the-powers-that-be started releasing sports-themed video games and threw that entire equation into whack. (I may be protecting a bit.)

Sports video games are one the oldest genre of video games dating back as far as as our oldest consoles. I mean if you think about it, even Pong is essentially just simplified table tennis. It's a premise that makes a lot of sense to developers and consumers: Sports are games governed by rules and bestowed certain win conditions, just like a video game. So it makes sense that we have all of these sports-games with super imaginative names like 1983's 'Baseball' for the NES or 1984's 'Tennis' and 'Golf'. These games even resemble the sport they are supposed to be representing, kinda.

Situations and hardware have certainly evolved since the days of the NES and consequently so have these sports games, now they feature a higher degree of fidelity to the game they're attempting to emulate. Gameplay has become tighter and more varied, models have all kinds of polygons now and the sound of boots on grass have never sounded more real. Like any other genre, sports games kept growing and growing with exponential quality until we hit the modern age. (But only if we pretend the modern age is the early 2000's.)

Something strange started to happen in the late 2000's to the quality of sports titles. It seems that the more they became associated with the monopolistic entities that control real sports, the more lifeless they became. I'm not talking about games that have started to lose their creative charm as they slowly tread towards being more 'real', although that is an issue; I mean series that have either halted their progression toward improvement entirely or have even backtracked. Many late 2000's sports games have some of the most rudimentary 'character creation' systems in the gaming market, despite that fact that the rest of the industry mastered that by 2007's Mass Effect.

But the issues don't just end with players being unable to realize themselves in the game. Some football games had progressively gutted down career and management modes; wrestling games experiment with and then subsequently dropped several of their more stylized features (such as story creators) and American football games essentially lost everything unique to them but for absolute core features that make the game run. What could possibly be the purpose for this? Why, to add that content again several iterations down the line and call it a new feature, of course. (Can we call this 'creative laziness' without it sounding like praise?)

Some of the reasoning for these exclusions are genuinely laughable, too. I recently watched a Madden developer affirm, with a straight face, that they couldn't render the 42 different helmets required to create the 'Pro bowl' without hitting the memory limited instituted by current day consoles. It almost isn't worth the breath to explain how much bull is in that statement. Fifa complains how their yearly turnaround makes it difficult to create a substantial amount of new content. Surprising considering the fact they make the same game every year. All that development time must be going into that "The journey." campaign.

You may have picked up on the fact that I am not a huge fan of these sports games, but I'm not the kind of player that these developers are targeting anyway. They don't try to make anything worthwhile with their games because they definitively know that they don't need to. Madden and Fifa are both in that special place in society where their audience consists of casual players who have no idea of what a game should be and so except whatever they're given. Plus, these games companies spend all of their money and influence trying to crush any competition from getting out of the gate, thus ensuring that they never have any pressure to improve.

No where is this more evident then in the Ultimate Team modes. I've already talked about both microtransactions and lootboxes before, but trust me when I say that Ultimate Team represents the worst aspects of both of them. In Ultimate Team, players are tasked with assembling their dream team of players  in order to give themselves an advantage in competitive play. How do you get these players? Well, you buy them of course! In randomized lootboxes that have tiered rarities and consumables to muddy the waters even more. This obvious pay-to-win structure would raise hell in any other genre (Like it did when they tried it with Battlefront 2), but in Fifa the audience just lap it up whilst sometimes complaining about it on Reddit. EA's big money maker of the year is always their Ultimate Team program; it makes them disgusting amounts of money and emboldens them to try their hand at implementing the same systems into all their games.

As a non sports game player, you should likely take my general disdain for the genre with a certain grain of salt; but do not fail to recognize that I am foremost a lover of video games. Even genres that I have no interest in, like racing, inspire huge degrees of respect from me; I always keep an eye on those games just to admire the craftsmanship behind them if nothing else. Yet despite that, I have no respect for the sports game industry. Not one leading development team in that industry is actively attempting to forward their craft, they all just lounge about in their blood money squeezed from a customer base who don't know better.

It incenses me so much because it affects my games too. Lootboxes where conceived in the petri-dish that is sports games and now they are everywhere in AAA games. EA sports season tickets popularized the rather niche 'Season pass' gimmick and turned it into a industry standard. Who knows how long it will be before EA's next money-grubbing scheme sets it's claws into the mainstream. All I want is for sports games to be held to a higher standard, and I don't think that will happen with people like Madden and Fifa running the show. They have no competitors, no consumer pressure and no earthly reason to achieve anything higher and as a result they never do. Something has to give eventually, but until then all us pundits can do is sit on the sidelines and shake our heads disapprovingly. Maybe when the camels back breaks and these companies are in the middle of a full consumer revolt we'll have the opportunity to pat them on the back and say; "You earnt it, buddy."