The World Baseball Classic is back in 2026 and fans are excited, so it’s natural that baseball gamers want to see it in MLB The Show 26. Despite the Classic routinely capturing the eyes of baseball fans around the world when it arrives, its use in The Show has been more limited.
The primary way gamers have gotten to experience the WBC has been through Diamond Dynasty. With special cards and the option to pick up cosmetics of the national team sides there was a splash of World Baseball Classic favor, but not yet the full mode fans would love to see. Today we’re looking at the reasons San Diego Studio may have reservations about adding the WBC more thoroughly and also what more complete integration into one or more non-Diamond Dynasty modes might look like.
The Challenges Of More Thorough Diamond Dynasty Incorporation
So, if the World Baseball Classic is so popular with fans, why has its use in The Show been kept at such a reserved incorporation? While we aren’t privy to the exact reasoning within San Diego Studio offices, there are several reasons that a studio might be hesitant:
Formal Licensing Costs
A big holdup anytime you’re talking about incorporating new competitions into a sports franchise is always going to be the licensing costs. Developers of games based on American sports benefit from the insular nature of the leagues, with all players generally covered by a singular union to negotiate with and the league collectively bargaining with its image rights.
Sports with more international flavor like the EA FC series can show how challenging things get when it gets more complex, as the addition or removal of competitions and nations through the years has been routine. The most comprehensive World Cup game ever in EA’s catalogue came out for the 1998 World Cup and has never been equalled since.
By trying to fully integrate the WBC, developers would be taking on the task of attaining and maintaining every license and agreement required to represent the WBC with enough fidelity to reality to keep fans happy.
Player Image And Likeness Rights
As noted, when negotiating to make an MLB game, a developer can do so with the players union and more or less scoop up the entire roster required for the game, with a handful of one-off superstars like Barry Bonds and Michael Jordan the notable exceptions. For an online mode like Diamond Dynasty, this incorporation is easy as developers can simply only offer cards for players they already have the image rights for.
To create a playable Classic, however, you need to be able to represent all of the teams. This means one of several challenging options. Acquiring image rights for every team will be most authentic, but also most expensive. Developers could limit rosters to licensed players, but this could seriously hurt nations with low MLB presence. Finally, the game could use fake players generated for the rosters alone, saving costs but harming authenticity.
Structural Change Challenges
Putting the World Baseball Classic into a mode that did not previously have it can seem easy enough if you are not familiar with game development. Unfortunately, adding new content is rarely as simple as that, as the systems underlying a game that make it work are often complex and interconnected.
The World Baseball Classic would create entirely new considerations for developers and they would need to find a way to make them work within the existing framework. While this could go well, it is also risky as anytime you start changing core elements of a build you run the risk of introducing bugs and glitches that harm the experience significantly.
How San Diego Studio Could Incorporate The World Baseball Classic Outside Of Diamond Dynasty
While Diamond Dynasty integration has been confirmed, there are other modes which could also benefit from the inclusion of World Baseball Classic content. Here are three ways the game could use the WBC to spice things up, along with an assessment of what that might look like and how much work it would represent:
Road To The Show
The seemingly easiest way to incorporate the World Baseball Classic in terms of logistics would be through the game’s Road to the Show Mode. This allows the experience to be more guided and hard coded to reduce the backend work that would be required for the next two more in-depth incorporations.
Using competitions outside of the game’s primary scope is a common method of adding content to a Be-a-Pro mode. Not only have prior versions of The Show or NHL games used the minor leagues as a fun way to begin your player’s career with something other than the main section of the game that also provides a fun sense of progress, but the most recent NBA 2K game allowed players to choose between stints in one of two European Leagues during the developmental phase of the player’s career.
Incorporation of the World Baseball Classic would come with a bit of a story challenge on this front as obviously a player early their career would be unlikely to be playing on one of the power nations. There are two ways this could be addressed. The first would be for the Classic to be a later-stage objective to build at if playing as a player eligible to represent a title contending nation. Alternatively, players can be given the option to pick a less-prestigious baseball nation to have eligibility for, with a breakout performance for a non-contender being one of the ways you can put your young player on the map.
World Baseball Classic Mode
Another option to incorporate the WBC into the game without causing too much disruption to already created modes is to make it its own standalone mode. This is another common trick used by developers to incorporate a new license into a game when full integration would be too much, or just as a bonus in addition to full integration for gamers who want to jump right into trying out the new mode.
With a standalone World Baseball Classic mode developers would have an easier job of getting the required licenses for all of the nations as it could be created as a mode with a single static set of rosters for the participating teams. This would mean not needing to populate full player pools for the various nations.
Because the mode is pulled out and separated from the other offline modes, it could also lead to a less labor-intensive development process as the mode doesn’t need to be made compatible with the existing systems that power the franchise mode.
Franchise Integration
The seemingly biggest ask would be for developers to fully incorporate the World Baseball Classic into franchise mode, allowing you to see it play out every few years. The Football Manager series could show the way forward for this plan, albeit except for the series in its current state where international management has been temporarily removed as the franchise transfers to a new engine. In this system, you can pull double duty, managing both your club and an international side for the Classic.
This is the option which comes with the highest number of potential holdups, many of which gamers can see for themselves and others that likely only those in development would know to worry about. Any time you are making a major change to the underlying structure of a major mode like this, you run the risk of causing more problems than you fix, as the cancellation of Football Manager 25 shows.
With the World Baseball Classic being its own entity, there is not guarantee that a partnership with the WBC would continue in future years. Throw in that it is not an annual event, meaning it would only be immediately impactful on a franchise mode in years the tournament is held, and it’s asking developers to make a big swing on something that may not even still be licensed by the time the next edition rolls around. In an increasingly risk-averse video game development world, that makes this feel like the option we are least likely to see.
The World Baseball Classic is an exciting event for fans that has delivered some incredible moments, like then-teammates Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani facing off for the final out with the Championship on the line in 2023, but will it do the same for gamers? Where would you like to see the WBC incorporated and what do you actually expect from San Diego Studio when The Show 26 hits your PC or console?
