SBJ Gaming: Madden NFL 25, NBA 2K25 go bold with improvements

Madden NFL 25 is the fifth installment of the game for the PS5 and Xbox X/S consoles. The series is in its “midlife” with these devices, when development teams are hitting their strides with their understanding not only of the consoles themselves but all the software they use to make the games.

EA Sports VP and Madden NFL Executive Producer Seann Graddy walked me through how the artists, developers and designers at EA Tiburon approached this year’s Madden.

Grazing in the grass

In the many years in which I’ve covered game development, one aspect that always fascinated me is just how often producers and directors discuss achievements in designing ... grass. Yes, something as simple as a wavy field of green can be harder to nail down than you’d expect. I don’t hear this just from sports developers. Folks working on shooters such as Far Cry raved about improvements they’d made at Ubisoft on grass and foliage as well.

This happened when I talked with the Madden team as well.

“We had a new 3D grass technique,” Graddy noted. “We had new motion blur in the game. We improved the bokeh, or the depth of field, and then our lighting model is always getting tuned and tweaked, and those collectively make the game look really good.”

The improved motion blur comes less from the greater grasp on the consoles and more from Frostbite, EA’s ever-evolving game development and rendering engine.

“One of the things that we really noticed in broadcast [TV] is how much of an impact motion plays into it. And several years ago, probably going back to the previous generation consoles, we tried it. It just didn't look authentic and didn't look clean,” Graddy said. “And honestly ... I'm like, ‘It's not working. I understand what we're trying to do, but it just looks faked. And we got to a point this year where we prototyped it, and we were all like, ‘Wow, that looks right, that. Even if you don't tell somebody what it is, you just run the play for them. It's a subtle thing that really made the frame look more broadcast-authentic.”

More important, Graddy says, is knowing how to allocate resources. This is key when working on an annual game series.

Putting the ‘Boom!’ in Boom Tech

“It’s less about the grasp of the consoles this deep into the cycle. It's more about prioritizing the resources on the consoles and then the time to build something that is ready for prime time, and probably the biggest example of that is our physics-based tackling system, or Boom Tech,” Graddy said. “We actually were working on that last year, and we thought we might ship it last year. But it just didn't get to a point where we felt like it was being utilized enough across the game, or that the results of the outcomes looked authentic, and so we needed more time to get that to a point that it got to this year, where it was really giving you the outcomes that we wanted, which were less scripted, less animation-based and looked more authentic in terms of weight, momentum, player, height, things like that.”

But working on an annual game later in the console’s cycles does offer some advantages.

“In the early days of a console transition, you're reserving some of those cycles. You're reserving some memory to expand as you add new features to the game. But at this point in the cycle, you're typically maximizing all those and so you're making tradeoffs in in in other places to get something into the game,” Graddy said. “Maybe you reduce something visually or performance-wise, that most players would never pick up on, and that gives you some cycles or some memory elsewhere in the game to do something new that you want to introduce that year.”

All of this plays into one of the greatest challenges of annual sports simulation series like Madden NFL -- getting the game onscreen to look as good as possible. And sometimes, solutions come from other teams at EA Sports.

“We actually have a different lighting technique in College Football than we do in Madden. It was a new technology stack that we stood up to allow us to, in a more automated way, light all the environments -- 100-plus environments versus the 32-plus that we have in Madden,” Graddy said. “Potentially, that lighting model, that technology could come over to Madden in the year ahead and give it a different look and feel as well.”

NBA 2K25 hits PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and PC tomorrow, and it’s already snaring a lot of attention. Newzoo's Pulse, a market research monitor from SBJ’s sister company that charts play and streaming activity of games, has NBA2K25 as its top-rated game today (thanks to streamers showing it off on Twitch). NBA 2K24 has been a mainstay in tracking firm Circana’s top 10 games by monthly players .

The challenge NBA 2K25 faces at launch is one all annual sports franchises confront -- how to best market to players. Yes, you have a massive built in audience, but every year, players drop out for a bevy of reasons, such as having less time to play, sticking with an older iteration, focusing more on other entertainment options or growing so disgruntled over aspects of the series they don’t like.

It’s that last case that Zak Armitage, the GM of NBA 2K at 2K Sports, spoke to me about earlier this week.

“This year, especially, is a great example of how we adapt to and work with and from the community,” Armitage said. “NBA 2K25 is a love letter to core player base, to everyone who has ever given feedback over the years of NBA 2K. A lot of what you’re going to see in NBA 2K25 is from that player feedback.”

Community effort

Part of getting this marketing work is holding community days to show off 2K25 to players -- Armitage said these were bigger than ever, such as an event at the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame with over 100 content creators and a horde of fans. Armitage said as 2K Sports evolves how it incorporates community feedback, it’s “leaning into” folks who make livestreams and videos. The idea is that they’re hearing what the community wants in their chats and comments almost every day, so they’re in a good spot to provide feedback.

That feedback includes even nitty-gritty features, such as making it easier to get around The City, an expansive area that offers players different ways to play and interact with the game. It’s full of customization options and pretty big -- too big, as far as one subset of the community was concerned.

“The City is more condensed. It’s easier to navigate this year, to move between modes much quicker,” Armitage said. “There’s less running around and more ‘running it back.’”

The Visual Concepts studio, 2K Sports’ long-term development house for many of its sports games, added the Proving Grounds area to The City, a ranked mode where players can compete for bragging rights. This comes from direct player feedback.

Another mode, MyPark, is bringing back older courts that players have been clamoring for in a node to “old-school nostalgia” for games like NBA 2K15. The Auction House is returning to My Team, and Visual Concepts continues to make tweaks to the MyGM and MyNBA modes, such as adding in the Steph Era, in which players can relive Warriors PG Stephen Curry’s career ... or change it.

Visual Concepts has long been known for its graphical prowess, and this year, it added 9,000 animations -- something a better grasp on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S provided for -- to make player movement smoother and a new dribbling engine in the quest to deliver 1-to-1 gameplay with the NBA.

“We have a lot of quality of life improvements and other small things that improve players’ day-to-day experience,” Armitage said.

The USTA introduced a new way for fans to interact with tennis at the U.S. Open this year: Advantage Arena, an immersive gaming zone, reports my colleague Rob Schaefer.

The area sits just off Billie Jean King National Tennis Center’s main entryway and includes 13 stations, where fans can sample games such as TopSpin 2K25 to a tennis-themed Fortnite minigame called Tennis Storm.

USTA Senior Director/Digital Strategy Brian Ryerson describes the activation as part of a multiyear strategy to engage young fans outside of traditional broadcasts or match play.

“The time commitment to sit there and watch a five-hour match is not something that they’re [Gen Z] necessarily doing. They want to engage with sports in a different way,” Ryerson said while touring the area with SBJ. “By getting them introduced to the sport this way, it hits two parts of our goal -- one, obviously, [it’s a] U.S. Open brand play for our sponsors to engage that audience and turn them into tennis fans. But also, hopefully, true to our mission, [it gets] them on court to try tennis.”

As of Wednesday’s quarterfinals, Advantage Arena had seen 15,000 visitors, according to the USTA. Overall, Tennis Storm, the area’s most popular game, has logged 6.4 million players since launching on Aug. 12 inside Fortnite. Roblox Champions of the Court, a year-round experience modeled after the U.S. Open campus, has seen 1.1 million visits since the start of Fan Week (and 5.4 million since it launched last year).

As we toured the area, young people trickled in, mostly accompanied by their parents. The stations filled up quickly. Ryerson said the USTA’s next steps are brand studies to investigate the impact of the games on tennis fandom. The Roblox experience, for example, features “obbies” with sponsored elements by U.S. Open partners Ralph Lauren and Emirates, in addition to minigames and appearances by virtual iterations of tennis stars like Coco Gauff and King.

“The value for an Emirates and [other partners] is that this is a net-new audience engaging with them and the U.S. Open that they’re not going to get on our traditional digital platforms, on our social platforms, on broadcast, or even here on site,” Ryerson said. “The idea is you’re now attracting a much different demographic -- and it grows their relationship with us.”

• Apparel brand Round21's gear is coming to NBA 2K25, enabling players to outfit their MyPlayer avatar with outfits representing WNBA teams and players with hoodies, tees, bowling shirts, cardigans, beanies and more.

• The nonprofit Bay Area Host Committee and EA Sports launched a multiyear, founding-level partnership to work together on events for the NBA All-Star Game at Chase Center in 2025, Super Bowl LX and the 2026 World Cup at Levi's Stadium. EA Sports confirmed no agencies were used in this deal.

• NASCAR is sponsoring Blast's Fortnite Championship Series Global Championship and the Rocket League World Championship. Both take place at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, this month. Blast confirmed that it didn't use any outside agencies on the deal with NASCAR.

• A series of new multiyear marketing agreements bring a raft of new teams and leagues to EA Sports FC 25. This includes exclusive marketing and licensing deals with Italy's AS Roma and Napoli, Turkey’s Fenerbahçe SK and Galatasaray S.K., Norway’s FK Bodø/Glimt and Argentina's Liga Profesional de Fútbol (LPF). EA Sports confirmed that it didn't use any outside agencies on these deals.

• Team Liquid co-CEO Steve Arhancet explains to GamesBeat why his esports team -- and more personally, why he as a gay man -- took part in the recent Esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. “Will people doubt us and think everything we’re doing is sportswashing? Sure. But we have to believe in what we see and experience firsthand, believe in nudging and incremental change over time. We want to be part of that.”

• The Rocket League Championship Series has a new World Championship sponsor in Progressive, per Esports Insider.