I’ve been out on Madden for at least 5 years now, probably more like 10.
Kind of all sports games, really. They are just way too big of a time drain to play all the games, run all the franchise mode stuff to completion. Unless you are a kid you don’t have all the time anymore once you are working and have a family.
But especially not for one that doesn’t respect my time like Madden. That game has felt exactly the same for 15 years. The animations, player models, etc, everything is the fucking same with a new layer of shine on it. But why should they change? It prints money hand over fist. They’d be insane to risk losing money by changing something and losing any portion of their fanbase whi still buy it rabidly. Meanwhile the game takes forever to sim weeks (seriously, it has to sum the scores of 16 whole games each week, it should accomplish that in about a half a millisecond, not the 30-45 seconds or longer it always takes), even the menus take literal seconds to load in and out of. And since the interface is still so shitty, to do something as simple as navigate through your franchise mode to check some stats, change a lineup, and check the waiver wire, could require like 4-5-6 different menus all of which take seconds upon seconds to load. The whole experience just drags.
And how about the ridiculous fact that they still don’t let you change personnel in sub-packages outside the actual played game? You have to change the players while picking your play! While the play clock ticks down! Fucking retarded! You can set a depth chart in the menus, but you can’t, for example, put Randy Gregory in for Tyrone Crawford at RE in all dime defensive sets before a game. No, Gregory either starts on the depth chart, meaning he’s the starting DE in all sets, or he’s the backup, and he doesn’t start in any sets.
But you’ve only got like 25 seconds to change it all, to do every sub package you want to change, before the play clock expires.
Madness. They just don’t care.