Where Are the Tennis Games?

[SCB1990]

If it's going to be a big budget £45-50 game then its going to need Star players and not just a couple like EA McIlroy golf (never played it but going from reviews). Realistically would need 20+ M&F players. I'd want to be able to play at licensed tournaments so all the GS and then the next 10/15 top ATP i.e Indian Wells, Dubai, Madrid etc.

[JBulls]

Quote: Originally Posted by Malcolmpordes

JBulls, That sounds exciting. Tell us more! What do you know? I think Full Ace Tennis on the PC is really good.

Tennis Elbow 4 which has been announced and is tentatively planned for release in 2017, unfortunately I cannot share any information about the second game .

[Malcolmpordes]

Quote: Originally Posted by JBulls

Tennis Elbow 4 which has been announced and is tentatively planned for release in 2017, unfortunately I cannot share any information about the second game .

Thanks JBulls. I read about the next Tennis Elbow version. Hopefully Full Ace Tennis will be updated as well. The game has been dormant for a while, but I believe the developer has been working on other projects.

[Focus10]

It sucks we have no Tennis and Skateboarding games to play

[AnthonyKyne]

Quote: Originally Posted by richgrisham

I love The Golf Club and agree that it's a viable model - however, the developer had a HUGE advantage there - they already had a lot of the tools to create golf courses and the mechanics of golf itself because of years of doing outsourcing work for EA's "lesser" versions of Tiger Woods (i.e. porting a version to the Wii so EA's main dev time is dedicated to Xbox 360/PS3 version). Plus, the TGC dev team self-published, did early access on Steam, and went very wide. And while TGC appears to have been successful, I don't think it's been a massive runaway success in terms of revenue. I sure hope it's been profitable, because I'd love another update or new version in the future. Anyone starting today with tennis basically has to start from scratch. That's such a huge risk in an unproven market that I don't see anyone doing it. But I hope I am wrong!

Great article guys.

Just a quick thing on this Rich - we only ever did non-gameplay work for EA on the Tiger Series and we definitely wasn't allowed to use anything that was in those games. So TGC was from scratch. The course designer actually started as a terrain editor for a tank game.

Licensing costs are through the roof at the moment. My belief is that the only way we're going to see any innovation in the sports genre is to be creative with it, like we were with the Greg Norman Course Designer.

We should do a podcast about it

[Splitter77]

i would buy a tennis game, but it would have to have all the players like full ace tennis has on the pc.

I wouldn't waste my money on a game with 20 pros in it.
I would much rather a game with unlimited fictional players in it.

[emelki1968]

Great articule, and even better comments. Tennis and basketball were my favorite sport video games. I loved the Top Spin series, and Top Spin 4 to me was a master piece. The game play was the closest to a simulation game. Yes, it has problems with the net game play (one of those really hard aspects that almost no game was able to figure out), but the rest was great. I totally agree with Rich G. It is going to be impossible because of the sells and the cost of licensing. The worse part is that ATP tennis itself is in one of it's worse moments in History. It has less and less fans, tv ratings are in all time low and if we talk about WTA, they don't even know what to do. Serena Williams getting closer to 40 is the best player, with nobody behind her in the last 5 years. The least they could do is try to lure young people to their sport, and what better idea than with video games?
I just hope that one day we can see a Top Spin 5.

[CujoMatty]

Quote: Originally Posted by thehip41

Tennis Elbow on Steam. Get the Sams MegaMod. Its the best tennis game ever.

Bought Tennis Elbow because of your comment. Installed the Sam mod. Gotta say glad I did it's pretty incredible.