Love this game. Its the only way I will ever see the phrase, "Here are your World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates." Bob, sell the team and just buy this game. I feel even you would hate to work for you. Or just sell the team.

Been playing since 2017. There remains a great game in here but the lack of innovation, new features and/or new statistical data in the last 5+ years (The Perfect Team era) continues to be embarrassing. Just to name a few: launch angle, exit velocity, barrels, hard-hit rate, xSLG, XBA, etc. There is no Statcast type data whatsoever, despite these stats having been commonplace for nearly a decade in baseball. The skinning options remain poor and text size/formatting is a crap-shoot. Player profile pages have big gaps in some areas and awful spacing necessitating a scroll bar in others. The poor use of space would be less relevant if every pitcher with 4+ pitches didn't need to be scrolled to see all their data. You *still* need to restart the game completely to change the font style, meaning you need to launch the game 7 or 8 times just to see every font option available. Lastly - Perfect Team is a *ridiculous* experience. I admit that it was fun watching Dave Stieb beat out Dave Stieb for the ERA title in my league - though for a while it looked like Dave Stieb may have actually come through to take it, despite Dave Stieb being hot on his tail. Meanwhile, Dave Stieb's hot start to the season seemed to fade after the All-Star break but Dave Stieb came through with a hot finish in September to win the ERA title. Tim Raines on the other hand...

Click Hit Happy Click No Hit Sad

This game is loaded with micro transactions. Nuff said.

The "small developer" (aka: Com2us, a company work hundreds of millions of dollars) wanted me to make a review for them, so I will. The only reason I have 26 is because my online leagues converted to it, unfortunately. Single player hasn't been improved since 23. This "Draft Combine"/"Improved" Dev Lab don't bring any further strategy to the game. Just some cosmetic things that probably took, like, a week to implement. OOTP is now just an IP that was sold out in order to be a pay to win shell with Perfect Team. The devs for this are lazy, egotistical, and actively censor any criticism of the game on social platforms. The only reason to buy this game is if your online league requires it or you like paying full price for a pay to win mobile game....on the PC.

Many, many years ago I fell in love with and played daily the Earl Weaver baseball game. Being able to tinker and create lineups and then run games and seasons with simulation. What a thing in the early 90s. Just recently I was reminded of it and began looking for a game produced today that would give me the fun and appreciation of baseball. To me, on the whole, baseball is defined in my mind in the era of 1970-1990. I was a kid of the Big Red Machine. OH THE MEMORIES! OOTP is a game that has brought back to me all the joy of the "old" days of baseball because I get to see the interaction of not only the BRM but each of the teams of those childhood years. The years of chewing huge wads of bubble gum from freshly purchased and ripped open packs of Topps baseball cards. If this review strikes a chord with you then do yourself a HUGE favor and purchase OOTP.

Addicted to this game, unfortunately I am one year ahead in my seasons. Last year I played two spring trainings and two seasons, yes I'm a retired and 72 years old...keeps my mind young...lol Wish I understood hockey a little better, probably do that one too.

Franchise/Singleplayer is basically the same as last years, minor changes made to the Development Lab. Perfect Team/Multiplayer on the other hand, is even more P2W, which sucks.

I bought my first version of OOTP over 20 years ago and have followed the project ever since. OOTP is still likely the most detailed baseball simulation available, although the core baseball understanding is now approximately 20 years old and does not match a modern view of the game of baseball. The introduction of pitcher BABIP in OOTP 24 as a skill that could cause the expected BABIP against to range from .250 to .400 was a significant step away from a game that had previously prided itself on adhering as closely as possible to a sabermetric understanding of what makes baseball tick. These changes have also caused simulations in early baseball eras to become substantially less realistic, which takes away a key selling point of previous versions. Much of this regression in the quality of OOTP concided with its acquisition a few years ago by Com2uS, and the original lead developer who shepherded the game through over two decades is no longer part of OOTP. My primary experience with the most recent iterations of the game was through Perfect Team, with thousands of hours played each cycle. Although the game has considerable potential, the choices made on the development and community management end have steadily driven players away. Rather than taking that feedback and improving the game, the announced changes for PT26 have doubled down on the choices that drove players out of the game in recent cycles. As a result, I cannot recommend a significant time investment in PT 26 unless you already have strong ties to the community. My previous experience over two decades was through both running and playing in online leagues, and a vibrant community is the key to OOTP's success. Leagues run in previous versions of OOTP will seamlessly import into OOTP 26 and there is active developer support and a twitch community dedicated to these leagues. Overall, lacking a major competitor, OOTP will still likely remain the industry standard. However, the key new features introduced in recent versions have been a step backward both in terms of the baseball simulation and in terms of Perfect Team and other features aimed at the active community. I do still recommend OOTP as a market leading baseball simulation, but I would recommend buying OOTP 23 (or any other version of that vintage) and using a model which works better in most eras of baseball history rather than "upgrading" to OOTP 26.

I love this game, I really do. But as a long, long time Football Manager player - I see this company already heading towards the same mistakes. Unfortunately, as long as systems such as "Perfect Team" exist - that is, systems within a game that become its primary revenue driver - the rest of the game will suffer. If you have interest outside of Perfect Team, sadly, you will see very, very little development year by year in this game. Menus will remain clunky, memory leaks will never be fixed, and every other minor issue that you could initially look past will eventually wear you down and become burdensome after you see it pop up iteration after iteration. This game is fantastic on paper. The original concept is incredible. But without meaningful development, it will eventually suffer the same difficulties that Football Manager and Sports Interactive now face, and the company will suffer greatly for it. I have yet to see any meaningful development in the three years I've played and purchased OOTP, and I imagine that isn't going to change. Sorry OOTP, I want to support and believe, but I've been burned too hard from FM. Please do not follow in their footsteps. Continue to develop your awesome game. You need a dev who is passionate for the game as a whole, not just for driving revenue through PT.

I play OOTP every day, but I cannot recommend this game any longer. Don't let the fact that I have tons of hours mislead you... it’s more a reflection of habit and addiction. If I didn’t get the game for free as part of the beta team, I honestly wouldn’t be buying it. Perfect Team is a financial success, but creatively, it’s the biggest misstep the franchise has made. It shifted focus and resources away from the core game. After all these years, can anyone really say the offline experience has improved dramatically? Many longtime players would argue it has regressed. I could write a 10,000-word essay on all of its issues, but here are some highlights in no particular order: - OOTP is poorly optimized for 2025. A single save file can balloon into hundreds of thousands of files, creating a massive burden for backups, syncing, and long-term storage. In short, cloud saves are just not feasible. - The in-game 3D remains frustrating. Animations are rough, results aren’t physics-based, and the follow-ball feature is disorienting. After more than a decade of development, I still stick with 2D because 3D is just not good. - Game mechanics are bloated and inaccessible. Concepts like traditional player creation modifiers, sabermetric modifiers, league totals, and league total modifiers are scattered and unintuitive, especially for new users. - Online leagues are outdated. There’s no official server support, so commissioners must know how to set up their own server or pay someone to do it. More importantly, there are no anti-cheat tools. Commissioners can view or edit ratings, and concerns about this are often brushed off. A simple player editor lock would go a long way to improve online league transparency and integrity. - Documentation and support remain major weaknesses. Bug reports frequently go unanswered, and there’s no official manual to help players understand how the game’s many systems interact. It’s trial and error, even for veterans. - The community wiki helps, but it’s often outdated or too vague. Developers have been hesitant to explain how core mechanics actually function, citing a desire to preserve mystery. In practice, this just makes the game harder to understand and harder to teach. - The game often feels unpolished at launch. While there is some internal testing, the bulk of beta testing is handled by unpaid volunteers like myself, most of whom have full-time jobs and other commitments. As a result, the testing window before release is inconsistent, and many issues simply don’t surface until after launch. Despite everything, I keep coming back to OOTP because no other game offers this level of control over a baseball organization. The depth of strategy, both on the field and in roster building, is still unmatched. Even when the mechanics frustrate and confuse me, the foundation of the game is strong enough to keep me engaged. Customization is another huge draw. Whether I want to replay a historical season, build a completely fictional universe, or run a modern league with my own twist, OOTP gives me the tools to do it. Few games offer this kind of creative freedom. I’ve also built a lot of familiarity with the game over the years. I know how to work around most of its limitations, and at this point, it feels more like a sandbox than a traditional game. Most importantly, running an online league is still fun. The stories, rivalries, and personalities that emerge from human interaction are what bring OOTP to life. The software might frustrate me, but the online league experience is what keeps me coming back.

the people who don't recommend usually have doubled their playtime since their review.

Clearly not for me.

Unlike the Colorado Rockies, this game franchise gets better and better every year. I still have no idea what I'm doing but I love the game anyways!

First a disclosure: I was an OOTP affiliate until November last year, when the chief card designer escalated a private scrobble in getting rid of me in that business position and OOTP rather protected the bully, never talked to me, and relieved me of that affiliation; even threatened other affiliates that they would lose their affiliation with they would have me on their twitch show or have me as a moderator. You will understand, that I have nothing good to say about the people that run PT personally. BUT unlike them, I am able to differentiate between personal stuff and an opinion of a game! It is a little early to have a definitive opinion on such a deep game. Especially since OOTP brings you two games in one. On the one side the typical Sim where you can simulate season(s) of basically every professional baseball in US history from 1901 onwards. 1927 Yankees? Do it! Save Bill Buckner and win with the Red Sox? You can do it. Beat the cheaters in Houston, easy. The sim engine had taken big steps backward since the days it predicted the World Series correctly. OOTP 25 was such a bad engine with games having 4-5 home runs in deadball. A twitch-streamer who is replaying the career of Wilie Mays is so extremely frustrated with the results being nowhere near what actually happened, both for overall teams and individual stats, that he contemplated stopping this 2-year ongoing stream-series. The biggest problem in my eyes was the switch from a 255 rating to a 550 rating system with not enough time ( or bad and to small beta testing) to test it. What should give you a finer tunement of players leads to unknown and undesired outcomes. After one week no one can give a verdict on if 26 improves on this again and is on 24 niveau, at least. Let me put it this way: it does look promissing. The Beta Test named "OOTP 25" might be over. The second part of Out if the Park 26 is the Perfect team modus. This is the card collecting modi. Oh boy, where to start? OOTP 24 was maybe the pinnecale of PT. In fact hype for 25 was so big, Out of the park developments had the best start for a game ever. Plus it was the 25th-anniversary edition with a lot of new features. To be short it was a disaster. OOTP developments will tell you something different, but as early as December tournaments did not fill, had to be reduced in size so they were able to be filled and interest in the free pack drops in twitch shows from January on was about 50% of what it was at the same time last year. The change list for 26 read promising but for one point. The biggest ones: No more pack rewards but you win tokens called clubhouse stars in most tournaments. With these Tokens, you can choose if you want to get packs (historic or standard) or singular cards that previously were available in choice packs. Since this was my idea, I am biased on it and like it, of course. OOTP developments took my idea even further and got away with the choice packs and let you buy the card you desire directly. Love it, thank you. Secong big change: Combinators are now Varients. Very simple, renaming crap doesn't make it less crap! They did some minor changes on the bossting part, that are positive QoL changes but did a lackluster job on countering the biggest problem of the combinators aside from it being a pay to win component. The availability: The drop rate is supposed to be higher...I have not noticed that, but yeah it seems there are more of them in circulation. But does that help? No! you will have 99% of unusable "varients" that drop to you and you still have to pay to be competitive. Even worse now, you don't buy, you bid...but more on that later. In my opinion the easiest way to solve this problem, if you want to keep a form of combinators/varients, would be to make every card varient egible. Meaning for a fixed price ( for example iron cards 15k pp, bronze 20k, silver 25, gold 30k, diamonds 50k and perfects 75k) you can turn the normal card into a varient that you then can boost (and sell). This way there would be no gatekeeping to be compedative; it would not be pay to win and the actaul skill would deside again, like in 24, not the wallet. The second big change was that now you can "sell" boosted varients. Wait not sell, you can enter them into an auction house like ebay. There is no instant buy button. So what? Well, this is a pay to win game, having an auction house and limited acces to the base varients, because of them being rare drops the ones with the most perfect points will control the bidding on the "good" varients. They can always outbid you because the do have the resources. And since they are the only ones getting the base cards, they are the only ones that can boost them up and then offer the boosted ones for horrendous starting prices, financing the bidding of the low-level varients. That is not gonna happen, that would be too much for one person? First of all, I don't think so, but this a small community, we know each other. They will find a way to divvy up the market and do it as a Trust. I am not pulling this out of my imagination; 25 years of playing online games with limited resources and auction houses tell me that this is the only reasonable outcome. Think devilsaur-mafia in World of Warcraft. The only way to counter that would be to have the resources not being limited or at least easily accessible,. OOTPDevelopments refuses to do this...it is set up to fail. And third BIG BIG failure: During the first entry pool phase (so from friday to sunday) we had 2024 as run environment. And hooray we had baseball results. No more football scores, no 9 run 9th inning comebacks en masse. On monday OOTP switched back to 2010 as a modern environment and voilà we have the same problems as in 25. 19-12 games, 21-17 games, Yesterday a morning stream lost a round 4-3. In all 3 games he won he came back in the 8th or 9th inning by more than 6 runs. In one game he was down 10-2 in the 9th and won 21-10. In game 7 by the way, it was reversed. The series winner came back and won with 8 runs in the 9th. OOTP has to decide what it wants to be: a Sim, like it had been for the first 24 years, or a video game like in 25 or, as all signs indicate, 26. In my opinion they can only lose trying to be a video game. For a video game they would need, apart from up-todate graphics unlike the 2008 grahpics they have now, to compete with MLB The Show...and they cannot win this battle. Their studio is way too small to take on this juggernaut, and to be honest the product is not good enough to take them on. If they rethink things a stick to being a sim, that is their niche to thrive. I doubt that is possible with the current personnel since Markus left, but please surprise me. So would I recommend buying it to anyone who plays the basegame and has 24? Really, only if you NEED to have the lineups of today. Oh by the way, after having the same price for 10 years OOTP raised the price by $10 for OOTP 25. Markus explained in an interview why they were forced to charge more, and really anyone with half a brain understood that. Then suddenly OOTP Go! was not free but also cost $10. There was a big outcry in the community. I totally got why they charged it, again, but there was no prior information on it. Even on launch day. I was live on Twitch Air as an affiliate when it dropped. And when the first people said it cost $10 I accused them of seeing it wrong. But that is what information policy looks like with OOTP. Even their affiliates do not get important info like that to prepare the customers. Now, for 26 the price is raised by $10 AGAIN. so from 30 to 50 within 13 months. Make of it what you will. So, imo, if you have 24 stay on 24! It is the better basegame maybe look for up-to-date rosters If you have 25 and only play the basegame? You will get some QoL updates for $50...stay on 25, if you can get up-date rosters. Really if you have OOTP 22 to 25 no need to upgrade If you want to play PT, you don't have a choice.

SSDD with OOTP, the thing that really takes the cake is i had to buy ootp 25 to keep my playthrough from ootp 24 coming up. It's just gross and while the game single player is fun i'm tired of the money grab nonsense so i'll leave a bad review so at least people understand how far ootp has declined since i got my first copy 20+ years ago.

30$ more than last year is not justified, absurd and disgusting for the low amount of new content. Game is good tho.

I'm literally just a guy looking for a baseball game. Unfortunately I am not a very smart one. This might be the one review on here not by someone who is a spreadsheet snob. I cant wrap my head around what is happening other than the terms/rules im familiar with. The interface is intimidating to use, the tutorials need tutorials, and the experience is incredibly dry fortifying my apathy. I really would like to take my knowledge to the next level and understand team building, but this game drops you directly under fire. It would take me watching the videos they provided plus significantly more personal research to even have a base understanding of what is happening. Even then I still wouldn't get it. By what others are saying the Perfect Team implementation is destroying this game and with my limited understanding this is a major turnoff. FFS, I wish there was a reasonable baseball experience for the normal human person on steam. I don't understand why the only MLB presence on Steam has to be so grossly immersive. A bridging game experience would be so amazing and would be a great work up to this.

Perfect team - like any other Ultimate Team - has ruined this game.

THE LAST GAME I HAD BOUGHT IN THE SERIES WAS OOTP 24. THIS GAME SHOWS LITTLE TO NO IMPROVEMENT OVER THAT GAME.

Let me make one thing clear: I love OOTP and I love the formula. I will likely continue to play this version of the game as I've already bought it, however: The three main differences from this game and OOTP 24 is the development lab, the development focuses, and the draft overhaul. The development focuses seem like a gimmick that barely even change anything from season to season. At best you'll be able to get +5 on that pitcher's changeup by the end of his sixth year at the cost of -5 to all his other pitches. A very irrelevant feature in my eyes. The development lab is an interesting idea, if done correctly. As I had feared, OOTP has made the normal development of players more of a chore in favor of the new development lab. I have had multiple starting pitchers with 60-70 potential stuck on 40/45 overall for multiple seasons despite also hard focusing them in the development lab. (Yes I know I can turn up development speed) The issue arises in that they've fixed development from Rk to AA, but AA and above it is near impossible to push most pitchers to near their potential, and players at AA or above rarely develop from just playing games anymore. (If you turn up development speed, EVERYONE develops faster at all levels and that's not what I want) It's a novel concept with subpar execution that can also have big impacts on your save, forcing you to micromanage it. The draft overhaul is really more of a UI change than anything. The draft combine and MLB draft leagues don't really impact much. Also had a weird potential bug in that there were no high schoolers in the 2026 draft pool beyond round 5 despite the draft percent targets being standard in the settings. The formula of the game is still the same as it's been and it is still a fun experience, but the game has been pretty much stagnant since OOTP 21. I wish OOTP Developments would get into simulating the new age statcast batted ball, spin rate, and pitch mix type stuff. That would be cool. I do not recommend anyone with OOTP 23 or later to buy this year's game. I do recommend anyone new to OOTP or someone with an older game than 23 to buy this one.

This game is a technical marvel... in incompetence. I don't know whether it's Steam integration or just bad software programming, but it simply does not work. It doesn't even know how to uninstall so I can reinstall with a fresh start. Who developed this, because I know it ain't Markus. Even worse, there's been no response for help on technical issues. This may be the first OOTP I don't play since its release in 1999.

If you enjoy Perfect Team, you should probably skip this year. It pains me to say this, but it's clear the team is cutting corners and that they have way less resources going into making this game mode any good. - The Mission system has been gutted. There are way fewer missions with way fewer rewards and many weeks pass with absolutely nothing. Even when missions do drop, they are mostly pack rewards. Missions with concrete themes and those that you build toward over time are completely gone. This is clearly a result of the team prioritizing profits over gameplay and I suspect whoever used to work on missions was let go or reallocated to another project. It's bad, there's very little to do from week to week, and no one on the dev team is willing to address it - Eye does almost nothing this year, making OBP hitters without big power completely worthless. This doesn't seem to have been tested and in any case means teams are more homogenous than ever - The meta is moving slower than ever, especially for hitters. If you're not grinding tournaments, you have absolutely no reason to log on more than once every few weeks to see how your team is doing because there won't be anything to adjust Altogether a really poor showing and a huge step back from the past few years.

Mucho Good

This game was made for me.

great game