It’s official since last night, Top Spin will therefore make its return to PC and consoles, 13 years after the very last episodes. Thirteen long years since the release of Top Spin 4, or the one that many consider – rightly – to be the best tennis game of all time. It was released in 2011 on the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation and at the time, it was given the completely deserved score of 19/20. But why did we have to wait so long? Why did 2K Games take 13 years to release this Top Spin 5? It is not just a question of desire, nor a problem of development, or even of product quality, but quite simply a problem of money. Because yes, making a tennis game is very expensive. So of course, in terms of productions, we are far from the usual AAA which sometimes exceeds the budget of 100 or 200 million dollars. We are talking about a tennis game here, and it is already more reasonable in terms of financing. At the moment, we do not know the number of people who are involved in this Top Spin 2K25, but at the time of the first episodes at Pam Development, we were on teams of 30-50 people, no more. We imagine that for Top Spin 4, the number of developers was greater, especially since at that time, the French studio PAM had been bought and swallowed by the 2K Czech studio.
In reality, what siphons off the maximum amount of money in the production of a tennis game are the stars, the headliners who must be paid to sell the game. Federers, Nadals, Djoko, from Murray, you have to pay them a lot for them to agree to lend their image for a game. We don’t know how much you have to pay to have them today, but in 2017, during the development of Tennis World Tour, BigBen Interactive had to pay the tidy sum of €500,000 to obtain the services of Roger Federer. And this is the reason why the publisher made the decision not to include Rafael Nadal in the first episode, and why we had to wait for Tennis World Tour 2 to have the two greatest players of the moment at the time . €500,000 for Federer, probably as much for Nadal and Djokovic, we hardly dare imagine how much these players demand today to appear in a video game. Of course, smaller players, in terms of notoriety, it’s undoubtedly less expensive and it is possible to negotiate, but if you want the biggest players in the ATP, you have to take out the checkbook. And the big problem with tennis is that you have to negotiate for each player. Unlike football or basketball, it is impossible to negotiate by league and therefore by package to limit costs. This is the biggest concern when you decide to start developing a tennis game.
As a result, we have to sell pallets of games behind it for it to be profitable, and we know from a reliable source that Top Spin 4, despite its superb ratings and its glowing reviews from the press and players, is a game that didn’t sell well. We don’t have the figures, they are not publicly known (we are talking about 800,000 copies sold in total according to some rumors), but at the time, a former marketing director at 2K Games admitted to us that sales were n were unfortunately not sufficient to justify the production of a sequel to Top Spin 4. It must also be understood that when a publisher releases a tennis game, it cannot rely too much on the American market, which is generally cautious when it comes to of tennis. The United States has never been a market for the little yellow ball and it is mainly in Europe that sales must be made. We also know from a reliable source that every year, at 2K Games, during investment meetings, the question of Top Spin came up each time, and the publisher was looking for a way to bring back the license. We therefore had to wait 13 years for the project to come to life, and the information released via Nick Baker from the XboxEra site in May 2022 turned out to be real. It is also this same journalist who revealed that it was Hangar 13 which is behind the project, a studio known for the game Mafia III.
So we already see a lot of people making faces and asking themselves why a studio that makes open world gangster games is taking care of a tennis game like Top Spin? But players can rest assured: today, Hangar 13 brings together a good number of people who worked on the original Top Spin, since in 2017, the American studio merged with 2K Czech (the team originally of Top Spin 4 I remind you) which, in 2009, had itself integrated developers from PAM Development, the French studio which created Top Spin, Top Spin 2 and Top Spin 3. This therefore means that this Top Spin 2K25 does not was not developed by broken arms, even if we imagine that quite a lot of the original team was scattered all over the world. Moreover, among the people who allowed Top Spin to be the best tennis game of all time, there was Stéphane Dupas, but also François Giuntini, the two masterminds of the license. We know that Stéphane Dupas left 2K Czech several years ago, that he no longer works in the video game industry today and that he now runs a restaurant. As for François Giuntini, he is still at 2K Games but in San Francisco where he holds the position of design director. However, we do not know if he is one of the people who worked for the return of Top Spin…
For the moment, the information is scant, we just have an official website and a few less than engaging details. There is a teaser to wait, but we are now waiting for something concrete. In any case, there is a good chance that 2K Games will adopt the same system as its other sports games, which are based on the NBA 2K business model. So obviously, this is not very reassuring when we know to what extent the NBA 2K license has become a slave to its micro-transactions, but it is perhaps the only valid way to make the Top Spin license last on the long term. We’re taking this opportunity to send a message to 2K Games: there’s no point in annualizing the franchise. On the other hand, real-time updates, special events, paid DLC to maintain the community, that would be the right direction to take. On the other hand, please don’t ruin the license with the same VC system that is slowly killing the NBA 2K series. On the other hand, give us a very complete MyCareer mode, mixing the greatest tennis players and tennjiswomen, with rising stars, legends too. Make us dream and if you want to save money, even if development is already well advanced, and probably finished, given that an imminent release is announced, you just have to copy and paste the gameplay of Top Spin 4 by updating it, since it was already perfect…