The Stories of 2015: The Compacted Sports Game Release Calendar
 

The Sports Gaming release calendar was a little, ahem, compact this year.

Madden NFL 16 released on August 25. Within a couple of weeks NHL 16 and PES 2016 were out. Then the next week FIFA 16 was out.

Then the very next week it was time for both NBA games to release.

And those were just the major titles -- all within a month's span. You still had independent titles, smaller sports titles, and (oh by the way) all of the other non-sports games.

Compacting the release schedule like this was completely unnecessary and likely cost each game in terms of overall sales.

The fix seems simple enough. FIFA and PES should both be moved back into the summer when most leagues globally are getting ready to launch. NBA games should be pushed back to mid-late October and Madden should probably be pushed back a week or so to Mid-August vs. Late-August.

When combined with EA's annual June release of UFC or Rory -- you'd have sports games from April to October releasing every month but May. And when you get down to it, May is a great time for independent studios to fill a void.

That calendar would give us one new sports game per month to enjoy, break down, play in online leagues, and spend our hard earned money on Ultimate Team.

Instead we got everything within a 6 week window. What a shame.

Let's make a change in 2016 publishers.

I was beyond upset with the last two qtrs of game releases....i had to push back on some titles and even alot of other things time definitely were not put into. I actually restarted playing madden a week ago after not touchin the game for maybe 2 months n change..and Ive slowed my NBA 2K16 playing, didnt even have time to cop Live, still running my 10hr trial. i hope this doesnt happen again

There aren't many sports gamers who purchase every sports title so I doubt it matters that much. Soccer games are more difficult to pull off an earlier release because of the summer transfer window. There are several leagues and teams you'll have to do transfers for, not to mention create new characters in the mean time. Soccer games are the only sports games to launch after seasons already started because of the summer transfer window. It takes about a week or so for some games to keep up to date with their rosters, now imagine having to do that with FIFA or PES with every small move that gets made within a 2 month span of time. That would be insane and would cause difficulties to their team that it would make it pointless to have.

I would like madden pushed back a bit especially now that there is no NCAA football

Yeah, I'm in agreement that you can't release the soccer games earlier than September. With the transfer window being as it is until the beginning of September, EA and Konami would be under a lot of scrutinies for releasing a game with outdated rosters. PES was already harped for this with PES 2016, now imagine what would happen if that game came out in August while most European clubs make changes until September?

But, NBA games should not have released as early as they did. It felt like 2K released early not to combat Live but to hurt FIFA since they share a lot of the same audience (not to mention that even NBA players have admitted they play FIFA on the regular). NBA games should move to mid-to-late October while NHL should move to early October just before the start of their respective leagues. Unfortunately, that probably won't happen.

I've always thought that the WWE games should come out in March to coincide with Wrestlemania. I think 2K wanted to do that as well, but WWE the company blocked it. It would make sense and free up that time frame a bit for people who play other sports titles, as well as the fall and winter release titles.