BigAntStudios
Premiership Player
Whenever I've heard them talk on vids or whatever, they just don't seem like footy people. They seem like devs who have just been given a sport game to make. Perhaps they do and I'm reading it wrong, or maybe the devs who don't speak publicly do, but then you look at the games themselves and there doesn't seem to be a lot of passion or vision for what they want to achieve coming through. And I think making a satisfying AFL game would be very difficult if you don't have at least some key people who know the sport and have some idea of how they want it to materialise in video game form.
Not talking about this AFL game or any developer specifically - but it's a little worse than that in practice - the crossover of Artists and Coders that like sport is a really, really small niche, so it becomes not about having passion or vision, it's about stopping it from becoming a job they'd rather not do, a real chore. I'm sure if I took some guys here to the NRL they'd find it a chore to watch and hate it, I can tell you the opposite is also true, NRL fans in general don't like AFL. Simply put, if you're not into it, you're not into it, and it fast becomes a job with a deadline and you're not going to be going that extra mile or looking for the intricacies of it, you're just going to want it off your plate - you want to move on to make that thing you came into the industry for, the dream of working on a Naughty Dog, Rockstar, etc. title, not some sport you don't care about.