What Changes Will MLB The Show 23 Bring? The Challenges Faced By Baseball Games

2023 sees the arrival of the 18th title in the MLB The Show series of games released by Sony. With Jazz Chisholm Jr of the Miami Marlins confirmed as the cover star, what else do we know about MLB The Show 23 and the new aspects that it brings to the franchise?

The Latest Details

With a release date of March 28, this new baseball game will be created in different formats for consoles like the PlayStation 4 and 5, the Xbox One and Series X/S, and the Nintendo Switch.  Xbox Game Pass subscribers can play it at no extra cost, but there is still no PC version for this game.

A standard edition and a collector’s edition will both be released on the same date. One of the changes added to this year’s version is the way that the draft experience has been updated to allow players to add a more strategic approach to their recruitment.

The Addition of Storylines

While there are a number of changes from last year’s MLB The Show 22, what stands out most clearly is the introduction of a new historical mode known as Storylines. This is a feature that lets players discover what it was like to play the game in the past, with an immersive experience designed to let us truly feel the atmosphere of bygone eras.

It starts with a look at how nighttime baseball was first played, and it includes a narration by Bob Kendrick, who is a baseball historian and adds his knowledge to the retro action. As this is a live service, we can expect to see future Storylines taking us back in time to witness other important landmarks in the sport’s history.

Opportunities and Challenges for Baseball in the Modern Entertainment Industry

While the MLB series of games have been successful, there’s no doubt that this is a difficult time for the sport in an entertainment industry that’s bigger and more diverse than ever before. The World Baseball Classic has helped to attract new fans, as shown by this report in the New York Amsterdam News, but the popularity of baseball has been dropping for some decades now.

We can see how advances such as online streaming and live betting have given us far more ways to watch and enjoy sports than ever before, but the 2022 World Series averaged just over 12 million viewers across the different Fox options, which made it one of the least-watched World Series of all time. This compares to Super Bowl LVII, which was watched by about 50 million American households just a few months later.

Online betting has made a big difference to how we consume our sports, and this information taken from the Sportingtech site confirms that baseball is one of over 100 sports covered in close to a million live and pre-match events every year using their software. Since individual sportsbooks can customize their sites using this platform, it’s easy to see which sites put their focus on baseball and which concentrate more on other sports.

Will the Sales Figures Stack Up?

With several new baseball games launched in 2022, it seems that there is still public demand for this sport. However, Sony’s management will be keeping a close eye on the sales figures for MLB The Show 2023, to see whether it lives up to the hype.