The fascination continues… DID YOU KNOW…that MLB Advanced Media started out managing websites. In fact…the group is a limited partnership of club owners based in New York City, which operates as the internet and interactive branch of MLB.
In May 2012, Robert Bowman, president & CEO of MLBAM, stated that MLBAM generates around $620 million a year in revenue.
So as far as the video game aspect goes.
Namco created the R.B.I. Baseball series, and the original R.B.I. Baseball debuted in 1986 on NES in Japan as a Tengen-published title. A total of eight games were released in the series through 1995, when RBI Baseball '95 launched on 32X and Super R.B.I. Baseball came out on SNES.
In 2014 MLBAM, revived the RBI franchise; they produced and published RBI 14, 15, 16 and 17. For each of those titles MLBAM outsourced the development to several external studios. For 2018 the group decided to move all aspect of the game’s making inhouse, with RBI 2018 being the first RBI game that has been completely done in such fashion.
So does that mean we will eventually get a more detailed baseball game…who knows. But at the current timeline…This is the only sports league producings its own console video game. Only time will tell and I am sure critics will let MLBAM know what they have done right and what has been done wrong.
Here is a polygon article that covers some of the MLBAM interviews while going through the thought process of RBI 2018. I did find it interesting during my readings…RBI 18 was designed to be more of the arcade style than the simulation type of baseball game.
Adding another article from Polygon. This talks about the RBI revival in 2014.