In early 2021, gaming giant EA (originally known as Electronic Arts) acquired GLU, a successful gaming company which mostly made mobile games.
One of GLU's biggest titles was Tap Sports Baseball (TSB), a mobile-only baseball game where you both build a baseball team and play it.
TSB released a new edition each year, and was very successful. I started playing it in 2018, but eventually got tired of its money grabbing ways. It became a situation where spending money on the "bonus players" of the day became the only important thing to succeed on the leaderboard, and actual gameplay was just window dressing. I was able to subsist in the game, barely spending anything (usually like $1-$6 per year), by joining clubs where I would earn benefits mostly reaped by others in the club who spent money.
People were also irritated that they basically had to start over with each year's new game, though later editions let you transfer over a few "keeper" players, who were of limited use. You could still play the old versions for about 2-3 years after the new one would release, with a much reduced player pool, no bonus players, and no updates. I actually preferred that version a lot more, as it became much more about the play and less about the spending.
Anyway, once EA took over, the money grabbing became even more extreme, and the complaints mounted. More and more people quit TSB, though it was still quite lucrative. I imagine that they did have some substantial licensing fees to MLB and the MLBPA, though.
On February 8, the game abruptly went into the mode of an obsolete version, which was odd because that never happened until a new version was out, which usually occurred in March. Support lied to people and claimed it was just due to technical issues. In reality, they were planning to shut down the game. On Friday morning, this was posted:
This enraged the spenders of the TSB 23 game, as many of them had bought expensive VIP packages or purchased recent players, only to find out the game was essentially going into no-update/no-bonus mode, and would be closing entirely in May.
EA is also about to lay off some staff after shutting down both TSB and the mobile version of F1 Racing.
EA paid $2.4 billion for GLU, but must regret it now, as TSB was one of their biggest titles.
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