Every year around March, we’re greeted with a new MLB The Show game. It won’t be any different in 2026, as we already have details on MLB The Show 26 for next year. San Diego Studio’s flagship baseball series has long been the gold standard for the sport’s simulation. It begins with its nuanced physics of pitch breaks and extends to the intricate player movements captured through advanced motion technology. The flagship models, Diamond Dynasty and Road to the Show, while often criticized, keep players returning year after year.
This game’s position is clearly unique due to the lack of a competitor, and there are multiple reasons behind that: expensive licensing, difficult-to-replicate simulation, and a high risk of entering a market with an established force. We’ll be looking at all of these aspects to understand why we only seem to get one major baseball game every year.
Decades-Long Head Start
San Diego Studio has a head start over other developers by at least two decades. This is by far the most daunting obstacle, one that requires sheer time and resource investment for companies to catch up. SDS has operated with total focus since the mid-2000s, building up a reservoir of knowledge that money just can’t replace.
This has not always been the case; competitors like EA’s MVP Baseball and 2K Sports’ MLB 2K series were once decent series. 2K snagged exclusive third-party MLB rights from EA, but inconsistent quality meant it was in the shadow of SDS enough that the series eventually had to stop. Essentially, MLB The Show got so good that it kicked 2K out of the competition.
Now, the competition advantage isn’t just about core gameplay. Rather, it’s the accumulated data from years of testing fielding logic, thousands of unique player animations, nuances of pitcher windups, and the subtle tuning necessary to make a mid-level prospect feel distinct compared to an MVP.
No competitor can buy a better physics engine and achieve parity instantly with The Show’s current state. Even if The Show 25 feels backward in some regards, it’s several steps ahead of any incoming competitor by default.
Projects such as this require a huge investment that many smaller studios may not be able to afford. Publishers get frightened by the fact that the project will need to play catch-up for at least half a decade, and only then would they get to be considered competitive.
The Unbreakable At-Bat Simulation
The most significant barrier to entry is baseball’s unique challenge in game design. The sports core moment-to-moment action is exponentially harder to simulate correctly than that of any other. In other sports, such as basketball or football, the moment of action, whether a tackle or shot, can be broken down into clear, measurable variables.
This can not be replicated in baseball since the physics and timing required to simulate the exchange between a pitcher and batter are matters of milliseconds, and this is where new developers decide to take a step back. While others step back, SDS has spent years perfecting systems like Plate Coverage Indicator to accurately merge player attributes, pitch physics, and human reaction time.
If the game’s hitting mechanics feel “off” or “laggy,” the game immediately becomes unsatisfying. When the hitting mechanics of a game are bad, no amount of graphical polish or feature depth can save it. This isn’t just simply coding; it’s a tightrope walk where SDS manages the tension between player skill and random variance. It’s a core feedback loop that the sports gaming community demands to be perfect.
Risk Of Entering The Market
As if the technical difficulty wasn’t enough, the sports gaming market’s brutal economics play a huge part in there being no competition. The audience for such games is passionate, but niche, and allows for only one massive AAA-budgeted title. Potential competitors such as EA or 2K will have their debut releases compared against a fully featured, polished product that is perfected through years of community feedback.
Launching a new baseball game in a market that has MLB The Show will only lead to the game being deemed as less realistic or incomplete compared to the industry king. This, unfortunately, becomes an economic non-starter. The financial risk is insane considering that an investment of a whopping $50-60 million guarantees failure if the market names it a budget version of The Show.
Major publishers can afford to take risks like this, but even they would want to play it safe to focus on more profitable genres and those that they already dominate. Shifting their focus to dethroning a dynasty built on the highest level of simulation isn’t exactly the smartest move.
