Perfect Team is an ace for Out of the Park Baseball

Out of the Park Developments makes some of the most beloved and hardcore sports-management sims. Its fans come back year-after-year for its signature spreadsheet action. But a couple of years ago, the studio spotted an opportunity to grow its audience and its revenues in the live-service space. In the fall, it launched its Perfect Team mode, and now the developer is already talking about how this is freeing it up to do even more in the future.

As you might expect from the name, Perfect Team takes a lot of cues from the Ultimate Team mode in EA Sports’s Madden and FIFA. It has players build a team by collecting baseball stars from card packs. Some cards are better than others, and they are also likely more rare. Once you have your team, you take them online to compete against other squads. And competing is a lot like the rest of Out of the Park Baseball. It has you building a team, setting lineups for righties and lefties, creating a pitching rotation, and setting up a bullpen. It’s a clever mode that can keep fans coming back for months, and it also enables people to spend more money than just the upfront cost of the game.