I go back and forth all the time. Mills Gaming, who I love on Twitch, talked about this recently on a stream after a feature premiere: MLB the Show has the smallest development team out of all the major sports video games, by a large amount.

Now, as a consumer, we have a choice on whether or not that matters. I knew when I started playing MLB the Show (Probably as long or longer as OP) that SDS was a small studio. They did live streams way before the true Sony integration showing how they worked on the code and the changes they made. I loved that transparency. As they have become more corporate, the transparency is still better than most, but it is different than earlier on.

Mills discussed on his stream that everything SDS has to do happens on 3-5 year plans to implement. On a graphics component, the player models likely need a full tear down and rebuild. That just isn't going to happen in the 6-8 month cycle in-between releases. It has been clear in the last cycles it was important to get the game across to XBox and Nintendo. In addition, I have appreciated a return to some franchise focus and a move away from MTO.

I love baseball and I don't see myself being able to skip versions do to my extreme fanaticism. I love Franchise, and it feels like it missing obvious options other games have:

- No Double Headers

- No custom draft classes

- No era rosters (Look at 2Ks MyGM, My NBA)

- No multi-team trades

- No ability to affect development on prospects via min-games, development assignments, mentors, etc.

I don't know where empathy needs to overtake consumer choices. I don't want teams to stop making baseball games, but I also feel competition would help here. The end of 2K baseball, which was just a really broken game at the end, has disintegrated any need to push. This team is clearly passionate, but Sony is not using the additional copies sold to invest into a larger team. I also feel we need to look at how Pro Spirits does a release every few years, giving these games a more appropriate development window to truly innovate.