Sports Champions: By The Numbers

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It’s been just about two months since PlayStation Move introduced true 1-to-1 table tennis, archery, and gladiator dueling to your living room. The team worked really hard at making Sports Champions easy to play for everyone, while still making sure it has loads of challenge and depth for all you hardcore enthusiasts. You have played and played and played, in volumes way beyond our best expectations. So with the initial server shock faded, we can look fondly at our launch past. Check out some of the cool global stats we put together for some insider information on what your competition has been up to over the first month of play. We’ve also recently released a new Reverse Course DLC, but more on than in a bit.

First, the numbers …

Sports Champions stats

As mentioned earlier, the Reverse Course DLC is also now available on the Playstation Store. If you are hungry for more Disc Golf content this is definitely for you. We’ve taken all 18 holes and re-worked them for a fresh new compelling gameplay experience. But it’s much more than just an aesthetic difference of swapping the tees and the baskets – everything about how you play changes. You’ll need to come up with new strategies to master this course – tee shots, obstacles, hazards, where to lay up, shortcuts – basically everything. Check out a couple example holes for a taste of what we mean.

Sports Champions Reverse Course Sports Champions Reverse Course

We thought these stats were pretty interesting and useful, and we hope you agree. It lets us know what you like and maybe where we need to improve. Thanks to all of you, we have a better idea of what to focus on next. With the past and current out of the way, please help us look to the future to get even better!

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52 Comments

17 Author Replies

  • Hope you and your team plans or decide to implement online elements for this one. I know it may be too late to do that, but never say “never”. :-D I enjoy your game very much. Keep up the good work!

  • bring online to sports champions plzzzzzzz

  • yea this is a game that online would have improved the game significantly.

  • I love Archery, Disc Golf, but Gladiator… is eh..

    • Early after reviews started hitting my favorite part about reading them were the declarations that X event will be everybody’s favorite and Y event will be everybody’s least favorite. The funny thing was that X and Y were different in almost every review. :)

      This was the experience we had through out development as well with both internal and external user tests. Being a glass half full kind of guy right now (going into a holiday weekend at least), I’ll take that as a positive sign.

  • Love this game! My wife and I played until 3:30am last Saturday night and had a blast!

  • Give me a Move

  • Sports Champions by far the best Playstation Move game out there right now. Tell a title better right now. I look forward to more games for PS Move.

  • @4 A!! gladiator is awesome n challenging as a hard core game ;)
    n man do i sweat in gladiator
    i think this mode is where u have 2 the most movement

    • Agreed. Although I witnessed a certain unnamed VP throw his shoulder out in my office playing TT on the latest build once sometime before we announced.

  • lol. yeah seriously online (and actual possible-to-achieve trophies) would have kept me playing this game a lot longer.
    Still awesome for multiplayer though. :D

  • This game needs online!!

    Even if it is just a couple of the events. Don’t see why Bocce or frolfing can’t be worked to play online. They are turn based games.

    Won’t buy any of that DLC unless this game gets online support, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.

    bummer.

  • This game will keep the kids off the couch in the winter season. Thanks.

  • Your Table Tennis numbers are wrong…I had a rally go for 52 hits. ^_^

  • **PLEASE** Add online match!!!

    Plus, for table tennis free play, I would like to setup 21 points games.

  • Surprised that there’s no online mode for this. Really good game otherwise.

  • Do we have to wait until Sports Champions 2 to get more sports? I want Basketball (3-point contest), Hockey (Accuracy shootout), Tennis, Fencing, etc.

    More co-op sports would be nice too. I enjoyed playing volleyball with my brother.

    • More co-op in the future sounds great to me. BV co-op is one of my favorite as well that I hope too many people don’t miss. Hence the trophy to encourage people to give it a shot.

  • Time for someone to make a proper, fuller weapon-wielding game. Gladiator duel is great, but packing in more enemies, varying the environments and adding to the moveset would be pure awesome. And of course, the ability to move your character.

    Basically, I’d like to see a fully-realized Gladiator game.

    • Not sure if you ever saw the E3 2009 stage tech demo the team did for Rick and Anton, but we always thought that would be cool to explore as well.

  • Give us B-ball and other sports.. Not surprised that TT is the most played/challenging. It’s really well done, wish it had online play.

  • Gladiator Duel FTW

  • We need some online MP support. That woul be awesome support.

  • Please listen EVERYBODY wants online support for Sports Champions!!

  • Won’t be original: give us an online support. Not everyone have enough room to play two players at home. And computer opponents won’t last forever.

  • The local big-box electronic store had the Move and Kinect set up next to each other, and I was able to play table tennis on both. The difference was astonishing.

    The Kinect was easier to play – very forgiving, and it felt like as long as my hand was near where it was supposed to be, it worked. The experience of playing without any controller was compelling.

    The Move, however, was far more realistic. How I held the controller, and particularly how I flicked my wrist when striking the ball, made a huge difference in how the ball behaved. This felt like a table tennis simulator, not a dumbed-down kids game.

    Frankly, that’s all I needed to know. Kinect is the more cool concept, and will win all the short-term accolades. In the long run, however, Move ought to have better games with better control, and be the superior gaming platform.

  • Yes Online Support Is A Must Do On Your Guys List, I Mean If The Fight: Lights Out Can Do Online Gameplay Then You Guys Can 2, trust me it will very rewarding..plus probably earning more sells…DOO IT :)

  • I absolutely love Sports Champions. I guess I’m surprised Disc Golf is not in the top 3 – I’m completely hooked on it! Which only means more fun is ahead when I tackle the other sports.

    Of course, I’ll chime in on the multiplayer. A 2-or-more player disc golf would be awesome. I’d love to see golf become a full-fledged Tiger Woods type game:

    – Have a practice field & “putting” area, so I can test out different throwing techniques for distance and accuracy.
    – Allow practice on a particular hole
    – Allow for another course flyby during play
    – Eliminate recalibration between games, unless I choose to. Usually I’m the only one playing, so the calibration would not change if quitting disc and starting tennis

    Finally – 525 METERS!? WOW! Would like to know which hole that was done on – can only imagine it was from a high point..

    Anyway, Sports Champions has made me feel that my Move purchase was 100% worth the cost. Can’t wait to see what the future brings. Keep up the great work, Zindagi!

    • Thanks for the feedback and words of encouragement. We in San Diego here you, and I’m sure the Zindagi guys do as well. They have a few guys that are even sicker than me when it comes to mining internet data on the game, and I’m gravely ill on that front. :)

  • I love a game but i need online or leaderboard list !

  • It has a leaderboard in the game

    Awesome game, truely believe the reviewers didn’t take their time with it or even attempt to unlock any bosses. I love the bosses and didn’t expect them to be off the wall character types at all.

    • Thanks for the response here. We actually put quite a lot of work into the leaderboards. Hopefully you find it now, will try and make this more obvious next go around.

  • Add online, nav supported games and more sports for example:

    Golf
    boxing
    tenis/Squash/Badminton/beach tennis (with nav support)
    disk shooting
    bowling
    pool/billiards/Snooker
    darts
    dodge ball (with nav support)
    air hocky
    cricket
    fishing
    handball (with nav support)
    baseball (with nav support)
    basketball (with nav support)
    ice hocky/Bandy (with nav support)
    Slamball (uses facial recognition to detect jumping)
    tetherball
    Softball
    Curling
    Yukigassen (snowball fight) (with nav support)
    Ice/Rock climbing (beat the time)
    Rope climbing (beat the time)
    juggling
    Jump rope (uses facial recognition to detect jumping)
    Hurling
    Canoeing
    Kayak
    Fencing
    Rowing
    Rafting
    Paddle ball
    paintball
    lasertag
    Sport stacking
    Skee ball
    dominoes
    Horseshoes
    Knife throwing

  • I love Table Tennis

  • Nice stats! Gladiator duels is the game i like the most, with 2 controllers its awesome!

  • This game needs to go online, or Sony and/or Rockstar need to get working on a new table tennis game that works with the move. End of story. Make it happen.

  • really? only 29% use Jump serve? that’s sad.

    I’m proud to say I’m one of those 178 who got the platinum :P

    • The stats are about a month old, but still an amazing accomplishment. There were over 600k online SC accounts the last time I checked.

  • charging for the reverse course is stupid, it’s like charging us double for content we already have when we first paid for the game, sometimes i wonder who’s worse, pirates or game developers. your charging us to place the pins at a different location on the courses we already paid for… greed and abuse of DLC and pure lazy is what i call it, i’ll wait till it’s free for plus members.

    • The reality is that providing this DLC costs significant money. Perhaps much more than it should, but there is cost there and this wouldn’t have been possible to include on the gold master. We try and be as up front as possible about what is included with the content and how much it costs (<$3 in this case), but ultimately all of you will decide if it is worth it or not to you.

      In the end it is entirely optional.

  • I will be getting this for Christmas!

  • i agree, this is the best title for Move right now.. was a little short tho… i mean, archery and table tennis are fun.. and disc golf… but games that i want are ripe for a Move title… softball/baseball particularly… and i would imagine Harry Potter has some sorta ‘Move’ up his sleeve… i look forward to Sorcery…
    id imagine a sequel to Sports Champions would include an online aspect… good job and keep the games coming…

  • I’m from Colombia “South America” and I love this game… Table Tennis is AMAZING!!!!

  • I think it is great you are answering posts. I find it interesting that the facebook connectivity is mentioned. If the facebook app was available to sub accounts (or even better, allow sub accounts to become master accounts), I am positive this number would be extremely higher. I realize that this is a core function and not one for your group, I just wanted to mention it here in hopes that Sony gets off their duffs when it comes to community items like this.

    Get Lempel on this! :-)

    Thanks.

  • Thanks for answering so many posts. We love Sports Champions in our household. I know online play probably isn’t coming, but we have a couple of other feature requests.

    1: Remove the hilts from the augmented reality photos. It’s a really nice idea to have a photo with a sword or bow, but the photos don’t look good because the sword literally pastes itself on top of your hand. If you didn’t augment over the hand it would look much better, and I might post some photos online.

    2: After round replay. Review the matches, and save player-perspective or third-person videos to the HDD.

    3: Custom soundtracks. SC doesn’t really have much music, but we can’t play our own. I’d like to be able to load up some classical tracks whilst playing Bocce

    4: Use our PS Home avatar as our in-game character. Because my other half would really like to attack my likeness with a sword

    5: Log in with sub accounts and use items and clothes belonging to that acc. Being able to log in with more than one PSN account is something I think should be in all offline multiplayer games. Is there any reason why it can’t be implemented?

  • By the way… I know multiplayer might be hard for faster sports, like Gladiator… but surely it must be possible to get Disc Golf and Bocce, both turn-based games, to work online.

    It would be great to be able to play it online, perhaps with a video or voice chat stream at the same time.

  • just got my ps move bundle with sports champions. it really is a great game and man, it gave me the works. it is fun but you need to be atlethic to be able to play it more seriously. or if you are not, do warm ups because when i woke up early, my body was well, worked out. but good game and have a ton of fun.

  • Sports Champions is a fantastic game. Table Tennis is amazing.

    I have one problem though – Archery. The aiming always seems ‘off’ for me. Often my aiming arm (my left) will have to aim too high or too wide of the target. Anyone else have this issue? Am I standing too close?

    For Sports Champions 2 perhaps look at Kinect Sports for how to raise the presentation a notch or two. Kinect Sports is rubbish compared to SC but it has great presentation.

  • @#9…aww poor baby, the trophies were too hard…awwww

    Gladiator is by far the best part of sports champions… but of course i’ve only played it with two move controllers, i’d imagine it would be a lot less fun with just one controller.

    I dominate table tennis, but i pretty much suck at Frisbe golf….just like in real life.

    Thanks for this smooth launch title.

  • @#37..pitythefool852… What is wrong with you? Sports Champions does indeed support custom soundtracks!

    Pause the game, and go to settings, and you can set your custom soundtracks…

    To further point out your stupidity, on the back of the box for Sports Champions it clearly states that custom soundtracks ARE featured in this game.

  • @#40..Bearillusion… I had the same problem originally. All games worked fine except archery. But i was holding the “right handed” controller, pointed at the screen, similar to when you play “The Shoot”.

    To fix the problem you describe, try holding the right controller upwards….with the sphere on top, and the usb connection area on the bottom…takes a few minutes to get used to, but then it should be more responsive.

    I also thought it was because i was too close to the TV, but i think it was how i was holding the controller that you pull back with. Hope this helps you.

  • I’ve had the game since day one and I really enjoy it. I’m a huge fan of what I like to call “useless stats” or stats that you don’t really use for anything but that track your progress anyway, so I appreciate the post. I wanted to commend you guys for being so open with the community. I especially appreciated the way you responded to the above criticism regarding the Reverse Course DLC. We, as video game consumers, generally want to hear the deliberations developers go through when deciding things like pricing or whether or not a feature is printed to disc or released as DLC later. So thanks and keep up the excellent job!

  • @Chuckbait

    I swear, it didn’t say “Custom Sountracks” on the box when I bought it. Someone must have swapped out the inlay or something when I wasn’t looking :)

    To be fair, it was the PS3 that told me that SC didn’t support Custom Soundtracks. I loaded up the game, and went straight to the music folder in the in-game XMB as you would in ModNation Racers, and when I selected a song it said “the game that you are playing doesn’t support music playback” or something like that.

    Anyway, thanks for subtly pointing out my foolishness. A lesser man would have just said it directly and embarrassed me in front of the whole world ;)

    How about my other ideas though… anything else in there that’s either useless or already in the game?

  • Thanks for the reply Chuckbait. No that isn’t it as I’ve always held the Move controller vertically in my left hand out front. 99% of the time the aiming is just off. Weird as the tracking in Table Tennis is faultless.

  • i would like to see more games like galdiator duel come out but with more depth and less motion lagg time. By more depth i mean adding stuff like decapation gore more realistic swords, swords that when you unlock you get different bonuses and features to your charactor. A leveling feature would be nice if a game came about, for a certain charactor that someone may like to use would gain stats baised on performances on rounds I am not alone I have a microsoft heavy brother (as where i favor sony)that play this game for move and agreed on my ideas we are both big time gamers so we do know what we are talking about but just please consider what I’v said.

  • Topic Gun support. It would be helpful for all & increase support. Those of us that have two or more motion controllers and a navigation stick are more likely have the same question: What are the chances of some sort of universal compatibility in the shooter genre? It seems that Sony has two pistol-style options available as of now. Users have experienced lack of support for some games.The problem is there is starting to be an increase of these peripherals every week, but yet no REAL word on which (hopefully all) or at least some of the games they may actually work with Ergonomics,button schemes, &a durable product. This would open the door to your next game,patch,add on.Competitive shooting, Skeet, Trap, Duck,those are sports games as well.I have DL’d all the add-on and appreciate any company (gearbox especially) that continues to support their games. It creates buyer loyalty and trust in the company who created the game and re-assures the gamers that you are truly passionate about those who really enjoy your games. Keep it up and stand your ground when it comes to USvsThe Suits.

  • Thanks to the last patch it finally fixed the issues that i was seeing. Now i can finally play the game without it saying calibration error. This game is fun if more people would give it a chance it would be even more popular.

  • # 27 list sound good to me..will they do it ?

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