'Sports games are the reasons why other games get greenlit.'
The 2025 DICE Awards were a wonderful opportunity to hear high-profile developers publicly praise the work of their peers. And not just the dozens or hundreds of workers it takes to make great games come to life—around the show, you could feel the excitement for every other game nominated that evening.
That excitement was so palpable that we happened to overhear Bethesda Softworks creative director Todd Howard explaining to IGN reporter Rebekah Valentine that one of his personal favorite games of 2024 was EA Sports College Football 25. Howard was explaining that it takes so much great, often unseen work to make great sports games, which often cater to an audience that only plays that particular genre (given that Howard's enthusiasm for Bethesda's Wayne Gretzky Hockey helped him land a job at the studio, he clearly has reason to be so passionate).
Minutes after he passed by, Sony San Diego product development communications brand strategist Ramone Russell took to the stage to accept the Sports Game of the Year award for MLB The Show 24, a repeat achievement at the awards for the branded baseball series. With Howard's words fresh in our ears, we wanted to know—what is something unseen or unappreciated about the sports genre that often goes unremarked?
Russell (a little stunned by the back-to-back wins) offered some insight on MLB The Show's role in the Sony ecosystem. Though it and other sports series are mainstays on the yearly release calendar, he reminded our readers that large-scale triple-A development on a yearly cycle is "just madness."
But it's worth it, he said. "A lot of these sports games are the reasons why other games get greenlit," he explained. "If your sport 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."
"Sports games are a very important part of the video game ecosystem."
Russell's words land at a particularly apt moment, because mere weeks before he laid down these facts for us, his peers at EA were scrambling over a shortfall in revenue from EA Sports FC 24. "Global Football had experienced two consecutive fiscal years of double-digit net bookings growth. However, the franchise experienced a slowdown as early momentum in the fiscal third quarter did not sustain through to the end," the company reported in January. (The publisher seemed eager to divert attention from the surprise slowdown by repeatedly bemoaning that Dragon Age: The Veilguard "missed expectations" by only reaching a mere, tiny, unimaginably small 1.5 million players).
EA's layoff-inducing blame game is particularly disappointing when you consider what Sony San Diego has accomplished with MLB The Show besides driving annual spending from big baseball fans. In 2023, the team unveiled a new mode dedicated to The Negro Leagues, the early-20th century organizations home to a generation of Black baseball players, who the National League and American League had barred from playing in their segregated organizations. The studio didn't just add players to the game's roster, it produced a bona fide campaign called "Storylines" packed with polished documentaries that laid out the story of the leagues, and why their success was more than just a compelling spectacle.
"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," Russell explained to us in 2024.
That Sony San Diego was able to take such an ambitious gamble while pressing ahead on the next annual entry in the series remains a feat and makes this year's win all the more impressive. That the studio's steady performance acts as a foundation for peer companies like Insomniac Games, Guerrilla Games, and Naughty Dog adds an additional shine to its gleaming new trophy.
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