Of all the sim developers out there, one of the most in-depth and grandiose is Paradox. With game series under its belt like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, veterans of its expansive titles know just how detailed (and driven by numbers and buttons) Paradox titles can be. Imagine then, if Paradox made sports sims.
That's actually a possibility it seems, as Paradox CEO Fred Wester told PCGamer that he would love to make a baseball management game.
"While I love football (soccer), I'm a big baseball fan myself," Wester said. "I learned that baseball is huge in Japan—it's like the second biggest sport behind sumo. Baseball would be a great management sim, because there's so much statistics. Have you seen the movie Moneyball? The brilliance of baseball is that it's a team sport and a single sport at the same time. It's the pitcher against the batter and then it's a team game at the same time. It's like a team-based football game, only with penalties. All of that in a game would be great."
That expansive amount of statistics and information is something that Paradox does very well, though Wester did acknowledge that one of the problems with its titles is that they are hard to get into. He suggested that Crusader Kings 2 was one of the first steps in improving that -- despite the "terrible" tutorial -- and that Stellaris improved upon that again.
With a sports sim though, that wouldn't necessarily be such a problem, as people would already understand many parameters of the game. Considering the popularity of soccer sims too, it would no doubt prove popular.
The only thing it would take for Paradox to make such a game, is for studio director Johan Anderson to get into baseball, we're told. So, who's happy to ship him a glove and ball to see what can happen?
