Online modes continue to be among the most-played modes in most modern sports franchises, but even within the group that plays them, there are many tiers of players. While those with the highest skill often have the largest platforms to discuss games, their experience and needs aren’t always aligned with the majority of players. As these modes remain key parts of sports game plans, here’s how skewing too hard to the demands of the top players could harm games for the general gaming public.
Most Players Are Not Elite
The first point to understand when considering the problem of elite-focused gameplay design is simultaneously very obvious but easy for those in decision-making positions to forget: the absolute cream of the crop players are an outlier. The majority of players on video games are simply looking for a casual fun experience and doing so with skills substantially below the elite slice of the community.
Players care about winning, particularly in sports games where it is very explicitly the point, but they’re likely not devoting large portions of their time away from the game to researching ways to get better or dedicating significant time to drilling and practicing techniques.
Where the disconnect can arise is that the most visible portions of sports gaming communities tend to be the elite players. For games with professional esports leagues, analyzing and practicing games to win is part of the job. Outside of the professional ranks, the results from the highest-tier leagues in online play can dominate the discourse and lead to an imbalance of where attention is focused when patching games or designing the next annual release.
Popularity Becomes Power
Following in the same vein, elite players often become extremely influential within the community of the games they play. Whether it’s highly rated pros, weekend league legends, or online content creators on sites like Twitch or YouTube, individuals who gain followings can quickly become highly influential in the way games develop.
Popular Football Manager streamer Zealand Shannon has a running joke with his community about his tweet about the graphics in FM games having killed FM 25 after the move to Unity, which promised better graphics, leading to a year without a release. While the move to Unity has been confirmed to have been long in the making, the joke is based on a known reality in the sports gaming community: those with online followings can significantly impact how the game and community develop.
Tastemakers who plant a flag on a game can usually rely on their community to get on board, and by virtue of simply being popular, their words then carry more weight. While successful sports gaming personalities can have great ideas that make things better, they are just as capable of having bad ones, and the ability to grow the validity and power of those bad ideas can have harmful effects on development.
Meta Becomes The Boss
Top performance at online sports games often relies on more than just technical skills, but also tactical decisions. As players put hours upon hours into the game the community begins to identify trends and tactics that work better than others. When one becomes powerful enough, it becomes an essential part of any serious player’s game plan.
For highly competitive settings, this makes sense. Matches can be decided by fine margins, and it would be unwise not to take advantage of known game metas that outperform their alternatives. For players looking to have fun? That’s not always the case. You may choose to do research and find these meta tactics, or you may choose to play with a style that is fun for you, even if it’s not the most efficient way.
When game designers cede too much attention to the former group, the game is no longer being optimized around what is fun or feels right. Instead, design is geared toward “fixing” the game for elite online settings that the majority of players will never be a part of.
Joining Late Is An Intimidating Nightmare
Online play is omnipresent in sports video games. The move to card-based ultimate team modes has seen them become the most-played and most-supported part of any major sports game, as the microtransactions within provide a substantial part of overall revenue in modern releases.
Unfortunately, if a design team gets too focused on catering to the best of the best players, it can result in changes that are confusing or alienating to new players. This is a concern for both the gamer community, who are left with less-accessible games, and the developers releasing them, who will see less new traffic online.
If a game pushes too far into providing for world-class players in ways most gamers don’t require, it can result in an intimidating onboarding process. Anyone who doesn’t get the game at launch can feel hopeless trying to join up when everyone else is more experienced and more attuned to the meta.
Everything Spirals In On Itself
The biggest risk when catering too much to the experience of the top players with the largest platforms is how quickly it can compound upon itself. Each of the above problems is its own issue, but also intertwines with the other concerns.
The community can identify a meta, which the biggest competitive players and streamers help to make the predominant tactic in the game. Playing off meta makes you less likely to find success, so new players have less fun with the game and are more likely to drop off. This makes those whale players even more important to the company’s bottom line, so they skew more to match it, and the whole thing escalates like a snowball rolling downhill.
Do you think that the focus in sports game development has gotten too slanted toward the upper crust of players, or do you like things how they are? What changes would you like to see studios prioritizing in the future?
Published: Dec 16, 2025 10:00 am