How Sports Video Games Stopped Getting Better

Thank you to Odoo for sponsoring sports journalism with no gambling ads. Check out Odoo’s all-in-one business management solutions here: https://www.odoo.com/r/j3kR Sports video games used to be the fastest-improving creative product in entertainment. Every year, something genuinely new. Then, somewhere between the PS3 and PS5 era, they stopped. Not all at once — slowly. The leaps got smaller. The features disappeared. The games got harder to love. To find out why, I talked to Kofie Yeboah, who covers sports gaming on YouTube, and traced the story through the exclusivity deals that ended competition, the business model that replaced creative ambition with card packs and the volunteer community that spent twenty years keeping a dead game alive on a borrowed server, until that too was gone. Subscribe for my next video:    / @iamjoonlee   Follow me on social media: Twitter: https://x.com/joonlee IG: https://instagr.am/joon TikTok: https://tiktok.com/joonlee Substack: https://substack.com/@joonlee Business/Sponsors: [email protected] Media Inquiries: [email protected] Bio: Joon Lee is an independent sports journalist reporting on YouTube. He’s written op-eds for The New York Times and The Boston Globe and worked for ESPN, Bleacher Report and The Washington Post, where he’s interviewed and photographed sports & pop culture figures like Kylian Mbappe, Shohei Ohtani, David Ortiz, Mookie Betts and Action Bronson. He previously was a contributor to SportsCenter, Around the Horn and First Take. His work has been featured on The Best American Sportswriting series and recognized as a finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.