Most sports gamers have very low expectations of what their game should be, often they barely buy any other video game, so it’s just a random money sink for them.
They don’t mind being fed the same crap with updated roster every year, and worse, lots of them probably don’t mind them becoming slot machines. Either because it’s their own unhealthy habit or because they are not using the ‘feature’ and not interested enough in the inner workings of games to see how harmful they are.
It’s actually kind of weird to me that sports games haven’t seemed to really do the live service thing to the extent other games have. They just make an entirely “new” game every year and try to get you to spend $70 for some slight stat differences and maybe new players.
Then again, I only have 2. 🤷🏻♂️
That should just tell you exactly what’s happening; different methods of profiting. They don’t worry about trying to improve online play because they have the ability to resell the same game every year. If other games could do that, they would.