im currently workshopping a piece that im calling ‘SHUT UP SPORTS GAMES TAKE WORK TOO YA KNOW’
the best thing i can come up with is EA SPORTS DIRECT SOUNDS LIKE A REAL GOOD IDEA BECAUSE OTHERWISE PEOPLE GO ‘UGGGGGGG SPORTZBALL’
seriously tho as much as the top of this thread is me venting… im super curious if there is any space for a piece about how all of these games, espcially in 2017 are not only more than just roster updates, but have teams that are working thier collective asses off to spit in the face of said tired criticism
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If I’m reading right what you’re touching on is the dissonance EA sometimes finds with showing sports games at E3. Or at least the way that showing them off seems to play out on Twitter year after year. Someone gets up to present FIFA or Madden (where was NHL this year? 
) and Twitter descends into a cry from a group of people that the presentation is no longer geared towards. The folks that came for Anthem, Battlefront 2, and maybe, (maybe), Need for Speed.
My Twitter feeds always gets filled with “who is this even for?” when those presentations happens. And I always feel just little bit like, “Hi! Me! It’s for me!” I play most of the EA sports games. At this point I’m subscribed to EA Access and just play everything as part of the vault a year after the games come out, but I’m still excited to see story mode come to Madden and eager to get back to a second season of work with Alex Hunter. But must of the people I follow and that watch E3 don’t care about those games.
The truth though, I think, is that that doesn’t matter that much. There are plenty of people that follow E3 and new announcements that are excited about that stuff. There are rarely years when Madden and FIFA aren’t in the top 10 selling games of the year (at least in the US), and the developers all have huge fan bases that follow them from year to year. Like you, I wish people on Twitter were a little bit more nuanced or polite in the way they talk about sports games that just simply aren’t for them, but are hugely popular at the same time. That being said… I think they probably get more appreciation from other groups than we realize, certainly that’s what the sales figures show!
it just hits on this level that no one will really ever understand because im disabled so this is largely the only way i can connect with sports and while i took most of the late ps3 era off these games still felt familiar to me and thats comforting in a way, and also i dont think people realize how needlessly picky most sports game fans are about minor details… theres almost no way to win… and i just feel bad for everyone who works on these projects
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How about “An Ode to the Maligned Sports Game”
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