Does FIFA 19 show that annual sports games are declining?

So, FIFA 19 was released almost six months ago, and with FIFA 20 right around the corner, what has it told us about the state of modern sports games?

While it was a solid title through and through, FIFA 19 didn’t quite capture the hearts of gaming audiences like previous titles did.

In fact, sales were off so much that it has analysts questioning whether or not annual, iterative sports titles are worth the investment anymore.

And let’s not even get started on Electronic Arts’ stock. The company has taken a hammering ever since the game’s release and, though you can’t blame FIFA 19 by itself, a decline of 25% in sales in the first week alone didn’t bode well for the title’s overall success in the UK.

Nor does it look good for the future.

FIFA on the rocks

You see, publishers like EA rely upon that annual revenue from FIFA and Madden. When that dries up, problems occur and it isn’t just a one-time thing. That’s because sports games can lose an audience and, once lost, those gamers are tough to regain.

There are similarities here to RDR2’s online play here, with both failing to capture the imagination of fans with improvements to other varieties somewhat limited.

FIFA 19 comes top in UK charts, but boxed sales fall 25% year-on-year https://t.co/U9deNFpJCL pic.twitter.com/HJJVCrVYln

— GamesIndustry (@GIBiz) September 30, 2018

This doesn’t mean that football isn’t popular or that FIFA still isn’t a powerful brand name. It just means that FIFA 19’s sales were worrying enough to merit an examination of the franchise. The only problem with that is that an examination of the franchise has turned into a forensic analysis of the genre itself, much of which is based upon annual game entries.

Alarmingly, FIFA’s sales weren’t just weak in general, but particularly so in some of the strongest football game markets in the world, like the United Kingdom.

Systemic failures that go beyond the game

Such a phenomenon points to a larger, systemic weakness in the business model. No matter how much people love football, it may not be compelling enough to justify an annual game purchase.

The reasons for this are probably many and varied, but two things stick out most prominently in the gamer’s mind: lack of innovation and the lack of real, substantive changes that require a new game every year.

FIFA 19 was praised for its otherwise solid core gameplay, but it was heavily criticized for new features that seemed tacked on for the fun of it and were poorly executed by many standards. What this highlighted was that the devs and publisher might not “have their heart” in it anymore. Simply rehashing and pushing out a warmed over version of last year’s game with a few new modes (that don’t quite work) does little to convince gamers otherwise.

And that calls into question the need to push one of these out every year. From a revenue standpoint, it is quite apparent why EA does what it does, but in a world of games-as-a-service platforms and free-to-play and constantly updated Fortnites, annual sports games seem like a rip off at worst and stodgy at best.

Perhaps the decrease in sales for FIFA 19 points towards a larger, more transformative trend for sports games as a platform that is updated regularly, rather than reworked entirely on an annual basis.