The first thing I did after loading up this year’s game, MLB The Show 25, for the first time was skip through a frankly unreasonable number of ads messages about things for Diamond Dynasty, The Show’s built in gambling simulator card collection / ultimate team mode..
The second thing I did was poke around to try to figure out what, if anything, was different this year since the last time I played The Show in 2023. I ended up having to google it, because after a functionally identical onboarding experience in which you sample different control schemes and work through a sort-of tutorial, and after digging through the menus full of all the same game modes I’ve seen in at least the last few iterations, I couldn’t find anything unique. I got excited for a moment when I jumped into Road To The Show and saw the option to play as a woman, with a storyline about breaking glass ceilings and being the first ever woman in the majors … but then I found out that was added last year. Oh well.
After some extensive digging I eventually found what MLB The Show 25 has to offer that previous games didn’t:
- “Ambush Hitting”, a batting feature that lets you try predict pitch locations and is functionally not much different than previous “guess the pitch” mechanics
- Minor tweaks to the Road To The Show mode to pad out the (not very interesting) story a bit
- Minor tweaks to the way fielding works
- An odd “roguelike”-ish mode as part of Diamond Dynasty
- The usual assortment of roster updates
- A new season of the documentary-esque Storylines mode that looks at key players and moments from the Negro Leagues
That’s… not a lot. That’s a moderately-priced DLC bundle’s worth of new stuff at best, carrying the price tag of a full game.
It’s hard to fault the developers for this. Sony San Diego have a long history of excellence with baseball sims. The created a strong foundation almost 20 years ago and they’ve been building on it ever since, year on year, tweaking what they can and adding new stuff when scope and development cycles allow.
The problem is that the annualised sports game model is fundamentally broken. The only way it can be feasible to make a whole game of The Show’s calibre year in, year out is to limit the scope to the most incremental changes. Take last year’s game and make what few enhancements you can with the time allowed, while being sure to focus most attention on Diamond Dynasty since that’s the mode that prints money.
That’s not a way to create good games. Or, rather, that’s not a way to make new games that justify their existence; that differ from and build upon from previous iterations in substantial, meaningful ways; that gives someone who already has the previous version an actual, good reason to drop $120 on the new one beyond it simply being the new thing. This is a problem that extends beyond The Show, and it’s been an issue for a long time, but MLB The Show 25 really puts it into stark relief because of just how little it offers to someone who already has The Show 24, or even 23.
To be clear, there’s a good game underneath all that. Like the games that came before it, The Show 25 offers an extremely detailed baseball simulation that can be as realistic and hardcore or as casual and beginner-friendly as you want it to be. Like the games that came before it, The Show 25 offers a good variety of modes that cover individual games, a playable highlight reel of your favourite team’s season, in-depth franchise management, a create-a-player mode with plenty of RPG-style customisation and character growth (attached to a rather forgettable story). Like the last couple of years, Storylines shines an important light on the history of the Negro Leagues and the influence they had in the fight for civil rights—a bold and noteworthy mode, if a little too brief for what it’s trying to do.
Looking at all that at face value, MLB The Show 25 is a good game, with plenty to offer. But it’s a good game because it’s an iteration of last year’s game, as was the case with last year’s game compared to the one before, and the year before that, and the year before that, and so on. Anyone who hasn’t played The Show before, or at least for the last few years, is in for a treat. Taken in isolation, The Show 25 is a great game.
But it doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in a world where you can regularly find a near-identical game—albeit one that isn’t “current”—for a fraction of the price. It exists in a world where there’s a de facto expectation of a new licensed sports game each year, regardless of how feasible that is, where tiny incremental tweaks are the best you can hope for. In this context, The Show 25 is a good game only in so far as that quality is inherited from The Show 24.
And unless Sony—and the whole sports game industry, really—can break out of this pointless, unsustainable obsession with annual releases, that’s going to continue to be a problem for The Show.
Reviewed on PlayStation 5 with a review code provided by the publisher.
MLB The Show 25 is the latest and strongest example of how broken the annual sports game model is. The core game is rock solid, so first-timers are in for a treat, but there's almost nothing new here for anyone who's played last year's release, or even the one before that.
