It was an exciting moment for baseball fans earlier this week when EA Sports Executive Vice President Cam Weber suggested that the company could return to making baseball video games in an interview with IGN.
EA’s last Major League Baseball title, MVP Baseball 2005, has a noteworthy legacy in a sports video game world where yearly installations routinely trump their predecessors. The game was ahead of its time with features such as an owner mode that allowed players to take complete control of a team and design their own stadium from the ground up. Despite being 13 years old, MVP Baseball has an active modding community that still updates rosters, uniforms, and logos to this day.
One of the reasons the game is still so popular is that there is only one MLB licensed baseball simulation on the market these days – MLB: The Show. The Show is only available on PlayStation 4, leaving Xbox One, Switch and PC players clamoring for a new title. Following the release of MVP Baseball 2005, MLB signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Take-Two Interactive, preventing EA Sports from releasing games featuring MLB teams or players. Despite annual MLB licensed titles on Xbox and PC through 2013, no baseball game quite captured the magic of MVP Baseball. The exclusive licensing deal with Take-Two has long since expired, leaving EA free to get back in the baseball space if they wish.
“I would love to have a baseball game in our portfolio,” Weber said in the interview. “It’s something that once again, every couple years, we take a look and we talk about and theorize about what it might look like to get back into something like baseball.”
While far from a guarantee, it was comforting to hear that a return to the sport is something EA is thinking about and would like to do. Realistically, even if another EA baseball game does happen, it will be years away. In the meantime, for many fans, a little more more MVP Baseball 2005 will suffice.
