With the annual release of sports games, the changes that occur year on year are often fairly minimal, so could we be better served as consumers then if instead of being released every year, sports games were only provided with major updates every other year instead?
In PES 2021, Konami issued a season update, essentially just providing a fresh lick of paint to PES 2020 with updated kits and rosters. They put this down to “the sheer scale of everything we are aiming to achieve for our next gen debut”, and if PES 2022 is a successful follow up then this could perhaps be an idea for other sports game developers to explore in the future.
If we look across at the way that things are done with the Call of Duty franchise for example; those games are released annually, but they have multiple different developers working on them. Call of Duty World War 2 was developed by Sledgehammer in 2017, Black Ops 4 by Treyarch in 2018, Infinity Ward then developed Modern Warfare in 2019, and it was then Treyarch that developed Black Ops Cold War in 2020. So three different lead developers over the course of four years, and with each lead developer there’s always at least a two year window between releases, alleviating the pressures that sports game developers currently have with the expectation of a new game to be released every single year.
So rather than releasing a minimally updated sports game each year and marketing it as an entirely new product; other companies could maybe follow Konami’s PES 2021 blueprint and release a new sports game one year, offer a roster update the following year, and charge a reduced price for people to download the latest update to the rosters and aesthetics.
It certainly seems like a move that would be in consumer interest anyway, and this could be an interesting direction for more sports game developers to explore in the future.
How do you feel about this idea? Were Konami onto something with the PES 2021 season update and could this potentially be the future of sports gaming?
UK based film graduate with a huge passion for music, sports and video games.
