I'll never understand the people who buy the yearly sports game. The must've played that same thing 20 times already!
It's mainly a seasonal thing that coincides with the season of the sport, and the rosters at those given times.
It stops making sense almost immediately though since players in most leagues stay on for at least more than a year, which is where capitalism comes in and picks up instead. Publisher pushes for new and shiny product with newest superstar player on the cover with your favorite teams newest jerseys in-game and the newest licensed music, and the people who play tag along because of those incremental "changes" are still changes.
It's kinda weird though as you can clearly see that these communities have people who discuss which of the games were better or worse, due to these often small changes, and it's not always like the servers go down immedately when its successor releases. It's extra predatory nowadays since, with Fifa for example, you've got that Ultimate Team thing which really is just a gacha, where the stats of the cards are sorta based in reality based on the current season.
It's like it's own completely separate ecosystem of video games.
The easiest thing to liken it to is probably stuff like old Street Fighter releases, and how the updates were sort of treated as brand-new games but also not really at the same time.
The people I know who play Fifa don't actually buy every yearly release though, I think that's probably a common misconception, that literally everyone upgrades every time, but many people just play Fifa as a party game to bond and discuss the current football season with their likeminded friends.
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