Another year is nearly finished. The world keeps spinning, and so do baseball video games. For another year, we’ve staved off the inevitable gaming apocalypse (when there will only be three types of game: gacha mobile games, Roblox games, and Fortnite seasonal modes).
If this is your first exposure to this site, I obsessively collect and play every baseball video game. Any era, any region, any language, or even weird genres like baseball pachinko or baseball match-3 games. I’m an omnivore. I play tons of MLB The Show just like you probably do, of course. But I also dig through old Japanese magazines to find a PC-98 baseball game I’ve never heard of and give it a shot.
To get a better sense of my biases, you can check out the 2024 and 2023 versions of this post.
A Brief List of All 2025 Baseball Games, in Release Order
- HardBall! and HardBall II were rereleased as part of Accolade Sports Collection.
- Tribe Nine is an action RPG set in a sci-fi baseball dystopia.
- Bitball is a much-hyped retro graphics mobile game with a surprisingly huge feature set. Unfortunately, it launched buggy and still remains awfully buggy. More patches to come?
- Out of the Park Baseball 26 is the preeminent manager/GM game, with MLB and KBO licenses.
- MLB The Show 25 added college teams and better progression mechanics to Road to the Show.
- Baseball Mogul 2025 is another manager/GM game for MLB only, but it’s a bit dated now.
- Pro Yakyuu Rising is a new mobile game set in NPB from Com2uS, the makers of MLB Rivals.
- Numbers League Baseball is a mega-obscure mobile game that launched then disappeared this year.
- Downtown River City Baseball Story ~Play Ball, Kunio!~ is an English localization and remake of a Super Famicom baseball game, released as part of Super Technos World. Cool game with a story, but so difficult!
- Fantastic Baseball: Nichibei Pro is a Japan-only mobile game with both MLB and NPB licenses.
- An official collection of Bases Loaded games released for the Polymega emulation console.
- Homerun Heroes: Starstrikers is a Kinect-like motion tracking game for the NEX Playground console. These are a hot item and hard to get, so I haven’t played this yet!
- Backyard Baseball ’01 is a rerelease of Backyard Baseball 2001 for phones and modern computers (simple mouse-driven baseball game and millennial nostalgia bait). They did a surprisingly good job getting almost all the original athletes licensed to reappear.
- MLB The Show Mobile is an adaptation of The Show for iOS and Android, soft-launched in the Philippines only so far. It definitely needs improvement before a wider release.
And now, some awards:
Newcomer of the Year
This one’s a little tragic: As a failed live service game, you already can no longer play Tribe Nine. This is (or was) a sci-fi action RPG baseball game by Akatsuki Games. If the art looks familiar, you’re thinking of Danganronpa, which uses the same artist and character designer Rui Komatsuzaki.
Regrettably, Tribe Nine was released as an always-online gacha game. The gacha element doesn’t feel like a great fit for the story-heavy RPG design, so it’s not a surprise that monetization model failed. Unfortunately, when an always-online game fails, that means the servers get taken down. And then no one can play it anymore.
It takes a couple hours to even reveal the “Extreme Baseball” aspect of the game. A Steam review compared the baseball element to “Insult Swordfighting” from Monkey Island, which is accurate. You’re playing baseball not by aiming a bat cursor, but by choosing dialogue options that correlate to parts of the strike zone.
So, mechanically, it’s not especially baseball-ish. But I am starving for sci-fi baseball to return, like we once had with Base Wars and Super Baseball 2020. If it includes a dramatic story where the baseball games are played at city-scale and mean life or death for the protagonists, that’s even better.
In this case, it ends as a failure. But this was my favorite new take on baseball in the year 2025.
Old Baseball Game of the Year
Baseball games should have a personality. Video games are a kind of art, not a kind of widget!
Baseball games that get discussed as the greatest ever all have personality: Ken Griffey for SNES, MVP Baseball 2005, Baseball Stars, the original R.B.I. Baseball. If you’ve played these games, you can hear the music playing in your head. You can see the hitter snapping the bat over his knee. You can feel what it was like to toss the ball around the horn after a groundout.
After decades of swaglessness, MLB The Show has found some personality over the past few years: Much like David Bowie, the Stadium Creator taught us it’s okay to be weird (if only downloading people’s creations from the Vault would work…).
I’m not going to say Super Live Stadium has the best personality, but it might have the most. This Japan-only baseball game by Square turns towards Toontown and never looks back.
- Caught-out batters may get squashed by a cartoon weight, or blown to smithereens by a bomb.
- The arcing path of a home run turns into a big friendly rainbow during replay.
- Along with the normal old NPB teams with real players, there is a team of skeletons and a team of knights.
- Foreign players (or the knights team) will say goofy phrases in English after a big play: “I got it!” “He’s puttin’ on the steam now!”
- There are dozens of secret fighting game-style commands for unhittable special pitches.
- The real-life ads from these real-life parks are all replaced with ads for old Square PS1 games, like Bushido Blade and Final Fantasy Tactics.
I really enjoyed my time with Super Live Stadium this year, because it stands out so proudly.
Now, would I want to see those same cartoon animations repeat hundreds of times as I play through a full season? Hm, better not to think about that.
Baseball Game of the Year
Out of the Park Baseball 26 is a continuation of a long, long series (it is, in fact, the 26th game in the series, plus a couple spin-offs), and it gets my pick as the best baseball game of 2025. It’s a manager game. It’s a general manager game. And it’s a powerful sandbox that lets you create just about any league or universe of leagues you can think of.
This is a bit of a lifetime achievement award, to be honest. The list of new features was pretty light: An improved draft UI, improvements to last year’s popular Player Development Lab feature, and a licensed World Baseball Classic (minus most of the players on the defending champion team…).
But Out of the Park is unrivaled at what it does. Some large chunk of baseball fans want to play armchair GM, and this is the armchair GM game. OOTP includes years and years of real-named amateurs, so you’ll see real player names more than a decade into any MLB-set playthrough. Several times I’ve seen a prospect make their real-life debut and said “Hey wait, that Ke’Bryan Hayes I drafted years ago in OOTP is a real guy?”
Trade offers from the AI waste your time less this year, because they tend to be more reasonable than in years past. It may well be that AJ Preller is constantly texting other GMs to ask for their best prospect in return for two worthless guys (how else do you explain the Fernando Tatis trade), but I’m glad that doesn’t happen less often in-game now.
Prospect “risk level” is a helpful addition. Coming into the game fresh, you might get a little too excited trading for 17-year-old Latin players with 5-star potentials (speaking of Tatis). But that excitement would turn to frustration, as they almost never live up to the potential. It’s a realistic thing for younger players to have more potential but a lower chance of reaching it, but it needed to be said in-UI somewhere.
I spend dozens or hundreds of hours playing Out of the Park every year. Just about every year, I find a new way to have fun with it. Once, I made a fictional Italian league and simmed decades into the future before taking over a team, so I could have a history and records for my players to compare themselves against. Once, I made an MLB that followed the NFL schedule, to see how that might make seasons feel different. And it’s an amazing way to learn about the KBO and what it’s like to run those teams that have to deal with posting players, military duty, and scouting international minor leagues.
The biggest issue with the game for the past several years has been its lack of the Japanese professional league. Now that the Dodgers have captured NPB as their own farm league, how can you have a realistic sim without it? But finally, modders have been able to step up and rectify that.
The presentation during games is a little disappointing to me, but I don’t want them to continue chasing 3D verisimilitude. Yearly incremental animation upgrades and higher-res stadiums are a fight The Show has to fight, but OOTP could have taken a different path.
They won’t change course now, but any other art style would be cheaper and potentially better-looking. Nice artistic 2D recreations of real-life parks could look and perform better. Or a skeuomorphic art style meant to look like either an old-school front office desk or a tabletop baseball sim could be nice to look at. I think… I think Front Page Sports from 1997 looks and runs better than OOTP. And you don’t have to hear the crowd chant “Let’s go, let’s go” several times per game.
Despite the gripes, Out of the Park has dominated this genre for a long time now, and it’s for a good reason. There’s nothing out there better for making your own baseball pocket universe.
Looking Ahead
We don’t get to know years ahead of time what baseball games are incoming, but we actually know a decent amount about 2026 already.
MLB The Show just soft-launched a mobile game, which will presumably hit out wide sometime next year. And, more excitingly, it is coming to PC sometime in the near future (though 2027 might be more likely).
San Diego Studio have already released a couple of blog posts about features in The Show 26. Last year, they did this while holding back the most exciting tidbit (the addition of licensed college teams in Road to the Show). So far, we know 11 new college teams are being added, the AI batting orders are being made much smarter, and there are lots of new features on defense that improve animations or help differentiate the abilities of players.
As for Japanese games, Pawapuro and Prospi are both due for new editions. A new Pawapuro is a certainty. Could it join Prospi on making the jump to PS5? Or maybe even PC?
But I have some worry that despite all the investment in the new graphics and sound, Pro Yakyuu Spirits may go back to a mobile-only series. All of these recent seasons had no Pro Yakyuu Spirits game to call their own: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016…
Playground Productions have said from the start that their Backyard Sports revival would involve a brand-new game at some point. They’ve now narrowed their timeline to sometime in 2026, though we still have no details on what the game is. There’s no guarantee it would be a baseball game, or at least a baseball-only game. But baseball was the series’ starting point and most popular sport, so it have to be at least a part of whatever this is.
Two indie titles were originally announced for 2025 release but have slipped to 2026: The Ump Show and Indoor Baseball. The Ump Show is an umpiring game, which is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. There have been very small umpiring games or minigames, but I think the concept could work for a full, if small, game. And Indoor Baseball is a fun-first one-on-one baseball game from the makers of Indoor Kickball.
This is plenty to look forward to, but each year always includes at least one surprise as well. As a long-suffering Namco fan, would it kill them to make a new Mario Baseball or Famista game? It’s been a long, long time.