“These sports games that were loved and revered… just went away” – How a group of ex-EA devs are launching a new NBA game

Back on July 23, 2024, indie studio Play By Play, formed by veterans of Electronic Arts, announced its debut title, The Run: Got Next.

It was a stylish three-vs-three street basketball game with an eye-catching anime-inspired art style, and overall it clearly owed a great deal of inspiration to the output of EA’s Sports Big label, including titles like NBA Street.

The very same day that Play By Play announced The Run, the NBA reached out to studio CEO Scott Probst on LinkedIn.

“They asked if we’d like to talk,” he says. “This is a dream come true. We had felt that we couldn’t just go to the NBA with a concept on paper and say: ‘We want to make this game’, so we had built The Run.”

After the NBA came on board, the game was rebranded to NBA: The Run. And while it now boasts official players, outfits and so on, as well as a more realistic art style, Probst says that “the core DNA has always remained the same.”

The title started life in 2021, when Probst found himself stuck indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic. “During COVID, we were playing games with people online, and friends online, and reconnecting, and noticing that the sports industry was dominated by sim-based games.”

This prompted him to fondly recall more arcadey titles like NBA Street, a franchise that has not seen a new entry since 2007’s NBA Street Homecourt. “If you think about today’s generation of kids, they’ve never even had a chance to play an NBA Street or NBA Jam,” Probst says. “A 20-year-old has never experienced that game … These sports games that were loved and revered by so many people, by us, just went away. “

Probst speculates that EA Sports Big titles like NBA Street and FIFA Street disappeared as the result of a combination of factors, one of which was the economic downturn of the late 2000s, which caused big publishers like Electronic Arts to rethink their business.

“The games industry as a whole suffered during that time,” he says. “The company decided to focus on fewer, bigger, better. EA was making 50, 60, 70 games a year. It reached a point where the company decided to make fewer games, bigger and better. That led to looking at everything in the portfolio and identifying the biggest performers. Unfortunately, [the EA Sports Big titles] were part of that category.”

Another reason was that EA was simply launching so many Street titles so quickly that the market became “oversaturated with those games.” But the decision to try to release something in this vein in the 2020s isn’t simply an attempt to relive the glory days. The team at Play By Play believes there is a huge market potential for this kind of title.

“You look at today’s gamer, how big games have become and where technology is, you can see that there’s more of an opportunity for these games now than in almost two decades,” Probst argues. “It feels like the time is now. It’s an easy decision. We can pontificate all day long about why they went away, but we know that, having lived through that and been at EA, there was a market for these games, and people were hungry for them every year. There’s just an opportune time right now to get a game like this out and reintroduce this type of experience to the world again. Hopefully, we’ll prove ourselves right.”

The competition

The other major licensor for the NBA is, of course, 2K Games. The Take-Two-owned label has operated the NBA 2K franchise since 2005, and it is a juggernaut for the company – in its recent full-year results, Take-Two revealed that NBA 2K26 has shipped 10 million units to date, with “recurrent consumer spending” rising 10%.

But Play By Play doesn’t see much competition between The Run and 2K.

“I don’t think we ever thought: ‘Let’s go take 2K’s market’,” laughs creative director Mike Young, an EA veteran who worked on NBA Street. “We felt that there was an opportunity to deliver something more casual and more social than their offering. But we fully anticipate people who buy our game will probably also be 2K players and will also be playing their game.”

One big differentiator between NBA: The Run and other sports titles at the moment is monetisation. At launch, at least, Play By Play’s title won’t have any microtransactions; simply an up-front cost. Part of the thinking behind this was not wanting to “water down” the experience with not only in-game purchases, but also features like a single-player mode (The Run is multiplayer only), which would be a lot for the title’s small team to implement.

“We’re a team of 18 people,” Probst says. “We have hopes, ambitions, and dreams of doing so many different directions of where this game goes and how it could evolve, but first and foremost, we could never take our eyes off the ball, we need to be laser-focused… in order to deliver the core gameplay.”

He continues: “We feel like what we’re offering in terms of the quality and quantity of content, the price is more than fair. It’s something that we talked about for a long, long time. We never wanted to go down the free-to-play route. We always knew we were going to put a price point on the game because we didn’t want to price-gouge people. We didn’t want to have monetisation tactics in there. We didn’t want to have players ripping open a bunch of packs. For us, it was a very intentional decision to say, let’s deliver a really high-quality, awesome game that you can get into, with a price point on it with no other monetisation factors at launch.”

Probst does say that he can’t commit to no microtransactions indefinitely, but states that whatever the future of NBA: The Run is, it will be built in tandem with the game’s community.

“One thing we do and we take very seriously is building along with the community,” he explains. “So if the community tells us that they’d be open to this or expanding here and paying additional money for that thing, or they want a specific kind of mechanic, we can do things like that. But I can’t commit to no microtransactions forever and ever, because we want to grow this thing over time; there are other ways to approach that factor. But we will always make decisions with the player in the driver’s seat.”

Small but mighty

Play By Play as a whole is around 30 people, with 18 developers focused on NBA: The Run – the rest are involved in other functions like quality assurance and so on. As a result, development on the game is rather old school; people aren’t confined to their specialities and can instead branch out into different areas.

“This is a very passion-driven team,” Probst explains. “The amount of ownership that every single person on this team has taken. There’s no one person who’s, like: ‘Hey, I’m a designer, and that is all I do. I only work in this lane’. I’ve worked on Battlefield, where we had 500 plus people on the project – you’d ask someone to do something specific and be told that’s not their area, I have to go find a different guy. That doesn’t happen on this team.”

As well as having a resourceful team, another way that Play By Play has kept costs down is discipline; the studio has focused heavily on the essentials for NBA: The Run.

“We’re always going to shoot for the moon, but also we always have this lens of the game has to be awesome,” Probst says. “So let’s not overextend ourselves to a point where we’re going to put too much in this game, and it’s going to come across as good or watered down.” That has led to a deliberately constrained, PVP-focused scope in order to deliver a “really tight core experience.”

NBA: The Run is set to launch on June 9. The plan for the future is an open field; Play By Play’s leadership isn’t in favour of turning it into another annualised sports series.

“We don’t want to follow that model,” Probst says. “Given that we’re ‘street’, we shouldn’t follow that model, because there’s not a real seasonality to that. It gives us a lane where we can be more creative. This game can become something that evolves over time. We can add new modes and other ways to expand this game. Is it a forever game? Time will tell, but we definitely see this is a different way where we can differentiate from what’s out there in the sports market and not build a game that incrementally changes year over year. If we’re going to add something, it’s going to be a meaningful change.”

Play By Play clearly thinks that there is a market for arcade-style sports titles that isn’t being served. Would the company consider bringing back more arcadey takes on other sports?

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Probst laughs. “We’d definitely love to be in that position. NBA: The Run is our focus and something we want to build. We want to build on our partnership with the NBA. But I also think back to those days of EA Sports Big, games like SSX, Def Jam or NFL Street: there are so many different opportunities and lanes that you can go down. Who knows what the future holds, but I think there’s a world where, if NBA: The Run does great, we could be looking at building this into something bigger over time.”