I would not expect a baseball game to be ready for that console in 2014, however, unless someone signs with the league in the next two or three months. Conventional wisdom holds that any publisher who is interested in getting back into an agreement with Major League Baseball would wait until the next console generation to do so, and that may be upon us sooner than we think.
Pitching with it still was enjoyable, and its commentary was a mile ahead of The Show's. MLB 2K12 wasn't much to look at, but it wasn't unplayable. It makes a publisher less money, an outcome they are not very interested in.)īut if people are doing just fine with community-edited rosters and playing career modes that are three, four, five seasons into an alternate reality where present-day accuracy is meaningless anyway, it may change sports gamers' attitudes about habitually buying the next edition of the series. (Aside from the fact licensing agreements require an annual release, there's no way that system makes a publisher more money.
Practically every post I make about a sports video game gets a comment wondering why a series doesn't just come out every other year and release roster updates as DLC.
There was a very brief reckoning with what that meant gamers quickly understood that these series, no matter their quality, didn't sell very well because they followed the NBA simulation products by one month, and most folks are interested in college basketball only enough to follow it in one month, March. The last time we had a series cancellation anywhere near the scope of the one coming, it was when EA Sports decided to pull the plug on its NCAA Basketball series in 2010.
Thanks to the premium paid by previous management for an exclusive license that wasn't really exclusive, the title was blamed for a $30 million loss in Take-Two Interactive's 2K Sports label, though NBA 2K's phenomenal performance wiped that out and made the entire division profitable. MLB 2K has long been marked for death, even if its parent company never officially confirmed the kill. But the game isn't getting another patch, isn't getting any official roster updates, isn't getting official anything. Assuming 2K Sports doesn't pull the plug on online support for MLB 2K12 (or isn't forced to, for some reason, when the terms of its deal expire), then user-edited rosters may still be shared, and I'm sure there will be many uploaded next spring. There will be no baseball on the Xbox 360 next year. The long-underperforming MLB 2K series is done for, which made this past week's details about MLB 13 The Show significant, not for what they say about a game that will come out, but for forcing gamers to confront the reality of one that won't. Next year it won't have any, in name or otherwise. The Show has had no serious competition for five years. The first week after Thanksgiving is typically when MLB The Show's publicity machine rolls out the first screenshots and begins teasing upcoming details for the game, and right on schedule we got them this past week.