Coco Gauff is destroying people in Rome right now and really focusing on how bad tennis video games are blowing one of the best windows they've ever had. Every serve, every comeback, every loud night session at the Foro Italico during the Italian Open feels like something fans should already be able to play, not just catch as a clip on social media. Instead, a genre that should be poised to pounce has been strangely quiet. Gauff basically hands publishers a built-in protagonist, a ready-made fanbase, and real-world drama that already reads like story mode material, and no one seems to be in any rush to do so. The sport finally has a star that casual fans recognize; people obviously want to watch it and the games are kind of the only part that's still stuck on the sidelines.
Tennis has been heading toward this mainstream moment for some time, and Gauff has been in the middle from the start. She crashed at Wimbledon in 2019, beating five-time champion Venus Williams in straight sets as a 15-year-old in a match framed as a true changing of the guard. From then on, she made the “promising teenager” a “constant problem” for the rest of the tour. She won her first singles title at the US Open in 2023 and followed it up in 2025 with a victory at Roland Garros over world number one Aryna Sabalenko, becoming the first American to win the French Open since Serena in 2015. She is just as dangerous off the court. She topped the Forbes list of highest-paid female athletes in 2025, with the majority of her 30 million plus coming from brands such as New Balance, Mercedes-Benz and Rolex, and analysts routinely call her the best-selling female tennis player in the world.
The EA game has officially been discontinued
Longtime publisher Electronic Arts has completely shut down a spin-off game from one of its biggest franchises, EA Sports.
Tennis video games are stuck in the past
This is why the state of tennis games seems so oddly small right now. One “serious” series, Top Spinshe basically disappeared for over a decade. After that, the franchise went silent Top Spin 4 launched in 2011 and returned only with TopSpin 2K25 in 2024. This entire gap covers the years when football, basketball and soccer players could count on the new FIFA or NBA 2K every season. When TopSpin 2K25 are finally out, first impressions from OpenCritic and subsequent reviews have all landed in the same spot. Rally feels good, the core of tennis is there, but TopSpin 2K25 comes with a small list and not much to do. Outlets have been going over how many big ATP and WTA names are missing, and Reddit threads like this first list and this thread of roster complaints are basically people asking why a series that disappeared for so long came back looking half-staffed.
There's a real reason behind it, but it's also turned into a convenient shield. Tennis does not have one players association or central league agreement that covers everyone the way the NFLPA or NBPA do Madden and NBA 2K. The Professional Tennis Association makes it clear that players are independent contractors and own their names, images and likenesses, so any studio that wants a realistic roster has to negotiate many individual deals. Fans in TopSpin 2K community, like those in this licensing discussion, are very aware of how expensive and messy this is, especially for tennis series like Top Spin attempt to restart. But then look at the money. Sports video game market reports speak of a space worth tens of billions, such as football games EA Sports FC above and right behind are football and basketball, while tennis barely registers. Put those two things side by side and the line “licensing is hard” starts to sound less like a hard stop and more like a reason not to try harder.
Meanwhile, Gauff plays matches that already look like they were written for an EA Sports cutscene. She opened her 2026 Italian Open by dismissing Solana Sierra in the first set, went 6-0 down in the second and squeaked out a deciding set to reach the last 16. In her next match against teenager Iva Jovic, Gauff saved a match point and turned the whole thing around in a three-set thriller that was billed as a serious test of nerves. From there, she worked her way past Mirra Andreeva in the quarterfinals before beating Sorana Cirstea, who had just knocked out world number one Arya Sabalenko, to reach the final of the Italian Open. This run gave her a new WTA record for clay court wins at the WTA 1000 level at her age. If this exact arc was written in career mode, no one would complain that the story is over the top because it's already so clean.
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The audience is clearly not the problem, which is why it's all so frustrating. Studies in the sports game market show steady growth, with football, basketball and especially football doing their usual thing, while tennis is still being labeled as a “niche”. But look at mobile tennis games and that label falls apart. The team behind Tennis match stated that the game has attracted more than 170 million players worldwide, and a 2025 press release from the Winners Alliance announced that it was finally adding officially licensed professionals, something that should have happened years ago. Put it all together and the picture is pretty simple. People will absolutely show up to tennis games and stick around if the games are really good. The problem is not demand. It's because no one has really swung for the fences yet.
