Game design History Beginnings of sports games

Sports games today

The sports genre is currently dominated by EA Sports and 2K Sports, who hold licenses to produce games based on official leagues. EA's franchises include the FIFA series, the NBA Live series, the Madden Football series, and Tiger Woods series. All of these games feature real leagues, competitions and players. These games continue to sell well today despite many of the product lines being over a decade old, and receive, for the most part, consistently good reviews.

With EA Sports' domination, the market has become very difficult to enter; competing games in any of the above genres, with the exception of racing games, tend to be unsuccessful. This has led to a sharp drop in sports-themed titles over recent years. One of the most notable exceptions is Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series, which is often hailed as an alternative to the FIFA series, but does not contain as many licensed teams, players, kits, or competitions. Racing games, due to the variation that the sport can offer in terms of tracks, cars and styles, offer more room for competition and the selection of games on offer has been considerably greater. Sports management games, while not as popular as they used to be, live on through small and independent software development houses. Management titles today have transitioned to the very popular fantasy sports leagues, which are available through many websites such as Yahoo.

Nintendo has been able to make an impact upon the sports market by producing several Mario-themed titles, such as Super Mario Strikersand Mario Tennis. These titles sell respectfully, but are only available on Nintendo's video game consoles, for example GameCube, Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, and the Wii .