Sports video games are highly successful and culturally ingrained in the history of the video game industry. After all, early sports games like Tecmo Super Bowl, Excitebike, and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out played a gigantic part in Nintendo’s success in North America. Today, games like EA FC, Madden NFL, and NBA 2K consistently rank among the best-selling titles each year, capturing massive player engagement.
Yet, when the envelopes are opened at distinguished award platforms like D.I.C.E., The Game Awards, or the BAFTAs, these annual releases are often compiled under the Best Sports Game category. Additionally, the fact that Mario Kart World won the best sports game award this year is slightly strange. Surely that title belongs under a separate family or racing category, right?
With observations like that, it’s easy to say that sports games often don’t get the same respect as rich, single-player experiences like Expedition 33. Should they? Should they not? It may seem like an easy question to answer on the surface, but the answer lies in the community mindset, history, and overall gaming culture.
Dominant Sales, But Low Critical Appeal
Annual sports franchises have always been a commercial success, continually topping sales charts, earning billions in revenue, and gaining a massive audience. Though if you observe any award show, even huge sports titles like the EA FC or NBA 2K have a surprisingly low profile.
For the developers of sports games, the idea is to ensure the latest roster updates, refine the physics engine, and improve the graphics to maintain a stable player base, shifting from one release to the next. However, even after consistently dominating the market, it is difficult for sports franchises to earn critical prestige.
Award shows are designed to celebrate certain industry values: originality, creative risk, unique narrative, and an innovative game design. Sports games, however, are forced to prioritize loyalty to licensed property and gradual enhancements over innovations. The fast food vs fine-dining analogy works great here: one focuses on efficiency, a “good enough” experience, and wide appeal. The other focuses on a more tailored experience, a better atmosphere, and moments that stay with you longer.
The Annual Release Cycle
The main challenge for sports games desiring recognition from these ceremonies lies in their annual release cycle. A game in this genre must align with real-world sports seasons and constantly update teams and leagues to satisfy their fan base.
Unfortunately, this fidelity to real-world licensing and annual repetition creates a barrier to the type of eye-catching, quirky innovation that award judges give precedence to.
While a single-player RPG or an indie title takes a span of four or five years to develop a new engine and a vast universe, a sports title has to deliver significant improvements in a 12-month timeframe. Developers go through hell trying to come up with new advancements and overhaul the physics engine; outsiders deem them as tiny adjustments rather than reinvention.
Only hardcore sports fans, who value authenticity and polishing, are appealed to by the familiarity of annual sports games. They focus on mastering the mechanics of a single game, spending countless hours on it. In contrast, awards voters have a diverse palette, like shooter, RPG, and survival games, and are looking for something new.
Cultural Divide
I’ll be brutally honest here, as much as I enjoy games like FC, Madden, and NBA, I treat them as more of a staple in my gaming year rather than something truly special. Was I excited for FC 26 and all the improvements it brings? Absolutely. Was I more excited for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for all its new features, atmosphere, and rich RPG elements? You bet. It’s not even necessarily that one is better than the other; it’s the fact that scarcity demands your attention.
I will obviously be more excited for the next Red Dead Redemption game than I ever will be for the next Madden. The same goes for someone who doesn’t even play single-player games; they’ll just be gravitated to finding out what all the hype is about.
Annual releases also give off the idea that sports titles do not involve any sort of creativity. Adding to this, a public perception specifically around the genre’s “heavy hitters” is that they rely on the same mechanics and assets each year, featuring no real changes. Aggressive monetization models further damage their reputations.
Critics simply won’t nominate a sports game that is battling court issues for “promoting gambling.” Even if the allegations are true or not (getting into specifics here doesn’t really matter), the fact that they exist means they go against the values of what many consider artistic integrity.
And let’s be very real here, this is an identity that the publisher themselves are to blame for. FC 26 is great, but that doesn’t mean I can look past the fact that they ruined clubs with microtransactions.
Will The Perception Ever Change?
Just a few days before writing this, I also wrote about how mobile developers also feel ignored. Shroud, one of the most popular streamers, also echoed a similar sentiment. He urged that Arc Raiders, one of 2025’s biggest releases, should have been nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards. I partly agree with him, and I also think Battlefield 6 deserved a mention.
Even by just saying that, some people probably already have their pitchforks out for me. And yeah, it’s a problem. I’m not saying that Expedition 33 didn’t deserve Game of the Year; it earned all the respect it got and then some (I love that game). But that doesn’t mean a highly innovative and explosive release like Arc Raiders didn’t even deserve a nomination.
So yeah, once you think about it, Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards really are more about the best single-player games of the year. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 is one of the few sports games that have earned similar prestige, and that’s a shame. Then again, I guess we nerdy sports fans care more about these awards than publishers behind big titles; they just want that sweet revenue. To answer the question, I don’t see this perception changing any time soon.
