I am a big sports fan and, consequently, I was for a long time a big sports gamer because I always get antsy for the start of each sport season. When this generation of consoles rolled around, however, the games I played most during the PS2 era - Madden and NCAA - regressed badly. It's only in the past couple of years that they've even gotten back to the same level of features they had in the PS2 games (and NCAA still doesn't include teams outside of the FBS - not that it makes a big difference to me but it's just one of those things where, if it was in the game before, why not now when there's more disk space and systems have more processing power?). Most of the games got dumbed down and, more so than in the past, only get slightly better each year, usually adding in a feature that had been stripped out when the games jumped to the current console generation. As a result, I've started skipping games or alternating years with each franchise.
Another reason I've stopped buying the new games, or at least alternating years, is that I primarily play the franchise/dynasty modes in sports games so, to me, the roster updates are trivial since the "new" roster only stays that way in my franchise for the first season, if that. I don't play online and I really don't even like playing with other people locally much anymore so the need to have the newest roster doesn't interest me.
I will give credit to the NHL franchise since I believe it is the one series that really stepped it up this console generation but even that has started to get stale. (FIFA also got better but I don't think as drastically as NHL did. MLB the Show is a very solid game but the competition is deplorable so anything would look good by comparison and the Show has gotten very stagnant the past couple years. NBA2K has apparently been great the past couple of years but I'm not a basketball fan so NBA Jam is about as much basketball as I want so can't intelligently discuss it.)
Something I have also noticed is that the user experience in modern sports games is extraordinarily clunky. Maybe it's just an EA thing but the amount of time it takes from inserting the disk to starting an actual game in a franchise/GM mode is absurd and usually involves 3 separate loads and a couple "connecting to servers" even if playing offline as I always do (and I'm talking about just going straight into the game, not taking time to fiddle with rosters and team strategies or options). I guess that it's always been clunky but it's just even more noticeable now that load times are getting shorter and shorter / are being hidden in most other genres.
