At a time when sports games are usually packed with all sorts of official licenses, athletes, brands, locations, logos and so on - it's liberating that there are still smaller titles where gameplay is the focus.
One example of this is UK developer Steel City Interactive's recently launched boxing title Undisputed. It's been met with really good reviews, and clearly it was something gamers were keen on. According to GamesIndustry.biz, the title (which was released just the other week) is now officially a million seller.
The site interviews the head of the studio, Ash Habib, who talks about the happy story that the project has been, even though there have been both risks and challenges:
"I quit my job. I poured all my resources and everything into setting the company up. And it just grew legs from there.
We then got people from the boxing industry involved. And then people from the games industry... which was a lot harder, to be fair. Because here I was saying that we were going to make this huge boxing game, but I have zero experience, zero budget... it just sounds like a bit like a crazy pipedream."
But while Habib naturally is overjoyed by its success and says it exceeded the publisher's expectations, it was no surprise that there was a pent-up need for a good boxing game:
"There hasn't been a boxing game in 12 to 13 years. The way we've done Early Access and built our community, and the numbers we were seeing... I was hoping for a pretty good launch.
But this is my very first time. I have no benchmarks to compare this against. I could act like a spoiled brat and go 'a million's a million, what does that even mean?' But in real terms, I know it's a pretty incredible achievement for an indie studio's first title. And we've gone above our forecasts that the publisher had."
As we wrote in our review, Undisputed is a great game, and we hope for more milestones for Steel City Interactive's debut title.