Why Maximum Football went F2P in the traditionally premium sports game space

With few exceptions, the sports genres in video games are dominated by triple-A franchises put out by major publishers. Whether it be 2K’s NBA and NHL series, Sony’s MLB: The Show, or EA Sports’ redoubtable list, when most people want to play a sport video game, they usually reach for one of these games — which are always premium titles, usually with yearly iterations. So how does a free-to-play game compete in that same space? Maximum Entertainment believes it’s found a way with its upcoming title, Maximum Football.

At this point, it’s practically a meme in the games industry that sports games come out every year, demand a princely price, and yet don’t change very much or add much new content in each successive year. This has not stopped player demand for football games — in July alone, EA Sports College Football 25 was the best-selling game in America (and the second-best, thanks to sales of the MVP bundle). Maximum, however, has a different approach: Launching a game in free-to-play, then iterating on it with feedback from the fans.

GamesBeat spoke with Micah Brown, the game’s director, about developing a free-to-play football game for the market. Brown told us, “We are trying to jump into this space that is occupied by basically the biggest game studio that’s ever existed on planet Earth, and it’s one of their biggest games. So it’s a pretty uphill battle. and we’ve been in development for about almost three years at this point… We try to listen to our fans and and try to give them what they haven’t gotten out of other football games, and address the different features that they feel are lacking in some of the other football games.”

Maximum Football launches on Steam Early Access on November 7, where Maximum says in a statement it plans to “gather feedback directly from you, the community, so we can make the most realistic, physics-based football simulation game possible.” At Early Access launch, it’ll feature Exhibition Mode, with pre-made teams; College Dynasty, a customizable mode about guiding a college ball team; online multiplayer and the “Maximum Football Customization Suite,” where players can customize their own teams.

According to Brown, customization is one of the Maximum Football’s most important features. “You can customize absolutely everything. If you want to make a team of geniuses and have Albert Einstein as a quarterback, you can go ahead and do it. If you want to make a team of Barbies and put Ken as a quarterback, you can do that too. So the game is fully customizable. Everything about the players is customizable. Everything about the teams is customizable.”

Brown adds that Maximum made its football title free-to-play as a way of differentiating itself from other sports games on the market: “The obstacle we’re facing is that we don’t have the license to use any of the NFL or the college players, or anything that the fans are looking for. The fans are also very weary of other sports games. They only really trust two studios to make a sports game: 2K and then EA Sports. Other than that, most fans out there like, ‘Ah, this game’s not going to make it, you know.’ And so they’re not even going to get going to give it a chance. If we initially, you know, launched this game and said, ‘All right, this game is $40 for you just to be able to turn it on, before you even know if you like the gameplay.’ Most people out there wouldn’t even give it a shot. We knew that.”

Instead, Brown says that Maximum plans to make the game free-to-play from launch, and offer all of the features fans wish to play, with plans to possibly monetize in the future after they’ve already won players’ hearts with solid gameplay. “The thing that everybody is questioning the most is, ‘Can you do gameplay?’ Because other games can do dynasty, or they can do customization. They’ve come out before, but they didn’t nail gameplay. And gameplay in a football simulation game. You win it or lose it based on the gameplay. So we said, okay, let’s release this game as free to play… There’s going to be a lot of opportunities to play for free, a lot of opportunities to play dynasty and franchise and all of that for free.”

At present, Brown says the team is working on refining gameplay and working out any bugs in online play, to make the early access experience as positive as possible for users. “As soon as all of that is cleared through, we’re back onto gameplay. We’re just going to keep iterating on the mechanics that we’ve already worked on.”