They had their moment in the early 00s, but they went away largely because people stopped buying them. Even though Hitz and Blitz showed some of the more-cringeworthy aspects of their sports, the sales were good enough for the licensors to not really care.
If Tape-to-Tape ends up selling well, you’ll see the NHL pushing for their own officially-licensed version (because nobody in that league has any original ideas). The same goes for other arcadey sports games.
MLB tried to bring back arcadey games with RBI Baseball (through their Advanced Media arm) – without it, the only annual baseball game would be Sony’s “The Show”. They wound that down when MLBAM signed a deal to publish The Show on non-Sony platforms. I’d think that, if the sales justified it, they’d be happy to continue selling both sim and arcade games.
There was an “Ultimate Rivals” sports series on Apple Arcade, which I thought was kinda popular. They were also going to port a few games to Steam last year too - I wonder what happened to that.
I have AA (via their bundle, it’s not really worth it on its own), and within a few weeks I wasn’t able to find online matches. It also didn’t feel great to play (both on touchscreen and controller), and they never released anything beyond 3-on-3 hockey. I would not recommend.
