Sports games often get a bad rap. The fact that they’re released nearly every year, usually with only incremental updates, tends to rub people the wrong way. Most people see the annual release schedule as what it is, a maximizing of profits with a minimizing of effort. Every few years, most sports games get a sizable overhaul, but more often than not, things tend to stay the same.

Except for the rosters.

A refreshing of rosters is the real reasons that sports games sell in the millions year after year. Could developers release a new DLC roster every year? Of course they could, but that wouldn’t be maximizing profits.  

All that being said, if you can look past the money-grab part of sports games, you’ll see that they actually play a vital role in the gaming industry.

Sports are as mainstream as it gets and they’ve helped propel gaming into new markets. Games like Madden and FIFA have brought millions of sports fans into gaming, when they might’ve otherwise not been interested.

Growing up as both a gamer and a sports fan, sports games was how I introduced many of my non-gaming friends to gaming. We’d play basketball outside and once it got dark, we’d go inside and play NBA Jam. Likewise, I was never a fan of hockey until a friend got me into NHL ’09. Now it’s one of my favorite sports to watch. 

Sports and gaming have a unique relationship. In real life, you can’t go drive a stolen car down the highway and flip it over the guardrail at breakneck speeds (and live to tell the tail) like you might in Grand Theft Auto, but you can go to the park and play basketball or soccer like you do in FIFA or NBA 2K (albeit minus a hefty dose of skill). These games give us a unique opportunity to practice what we play and play what we practice.

Of course, they aren’t for everyone. They’re great for developers and their release schedule can be agonizing. But sports games are still an important, if imperfect, part of the gaming ecosystem. An ecosystem that would be drastically different without them.