SerpApi.Org
Video games have always been a way for players to get instant gratification. Whether you’re playing a sports game, a first-person shooter, or an open-world MMO, games are set up for you to succeed so you continue coming back and logging on. While you can fail at some aspects of these games, as long as you play enough, your successes will far outnumber your failures across any game.
This is perhaps more evident in sports games than any other genre in the industry. In NBA 2K, Madden, MLB The Show, EA FC, and everything in between, you’re set up right away to win. Naturally, you can make all of these games more challenging by altering your difficulty level or pumping up some settings, but with enough practice, you’ll win against the CPU 99 times out of 100. That might change against online opponents, but you have all of the necessary tools at your disposal to win.
And herein lies the question we’re posing. Sports games are designed to mimic real life as much as possible, but the one aspect of real sports the games choose not to copy is the inherent failures of their players and teams. Player injuries, career-altering decisions, and benchings are all a part of sports, but video games don’t feature this level of realism. This is a primary reason why you’re able to have so much success in games, but why does every developer choose to go this route instead of a more realistic one?
Sports Games Want You To Come Back
Across any sports game you can currently play on the market, you’ll find shared game modes in all of them that allow you to create your own player, take over a team, or simply live out your dream of playing your favorite sport at the pro level. In any of these single-player modes, you often have to actively try to not succeed.
For example, in College Football 27‘s Road to Glory mode, you could play horrendously during every high school game at the start of a playthrough. However, when it comes to making your college decision, you can still sign at a Power Five school and likely be a starter within two years. Even if you play poorly for your first college team, you can enter the Transfer Portal and sign with another team that’s offering you a full scholarship.
Naturally, in real life, it doesn’t work that way. However, in video games, the developers make it a top priority to maximize your enjoyment whenever you log on. As long as you’re engaged with the content time and time again, their job is complete.
While a portion of players would still be engaged with content if they were forced to join Southern Miss in CFB 27, many players would likely not play Road to Glory further if they saw their only option was the worst team in the game. That would be considered a failure, and those types of players simply want to log on, have a good time, and succeed while doing it.
It’s that mindset that the developers aim to hone in on with their gameplay design in sports games. If some players were to continually lose against the CPU, be forced to ride the bench due to playing poorly, or miss an entire season of a playthrough due to injury, they might quit playing the game altogether. Obviously, that’s not what any sports game developer wants, so they tend to stack the deck in the player’s favor.
Injuries are extremely uncommon, and if they occur, you can immediately sim to when your player(s) are healthy. You’re almost never benched unless you choose to be a second or third-string option on a roster. And modes are designed to treat the player as a type of deity, making the entire world revolve around them.
Entertainment Is The Key, And Little Else Matters
What goes along with continually returning to a video game is your overall enjoyment of the game. 99% of the time, you only enjoy games that entertain you to some extent.
As we’ve said before, some players enjoy being punished, so things like being benched or injured only add fuel to the fire for them. However, most players want to be entertained the entire time they’re playing, and being given every chance to succeed is how that happens.
It’s crucial to remember that a solid number of a video game’s player base doesn’t have much time to grind. If you’re a working citizen or someone in school, you might only have an hour or two a day/week to play your favorite sports game. Sensibly, you want to spend that precious time enjoying yourself, and not spending it riding the bench or simming through matches to eventually get the chance to play for a brief moment.
Instead, players simply want to log on, defeat the CPU in some matches, or make progress in their game mode of choice, and then log off. When you add more elements of failure, players become less entertained and more frustrated when they log on.
So, to sum up, while some players might want a more realistic experience akin to real-life sports, that gameplay model just isn’t aligned with what most players look for in sports games.
Developers want players to come back and stay entertained when they’re engaged with the content, which happens more often when players are given every chance to succeed, and failure is taken out of the equation entirely.
