REVIEW: Rugby World Cup 2011 on PlayStation 3 (version tested) and Xbox 360.

Posted on Aug 25, 2011

As with every other major sporting tournament, the Rugby World Cup has brought on a slew of merchandise. From grossly overpriced polo shirts and baseball caps, to key rings, magnets and other tat, the IRB, just like every other sports governing body, uses the opportunity of a World Cup to sell all sorts of merchandise to people looking for memorabilia of the event.

When you think of it this way, World Cup-related video games are no different. They’re not for the hard-core sports game fans, who undoubtedly buy all the yearly rehashes without question. World Cup games are generally for the casuals, who become fans of the sport for six weeks (or however long their team is in the tournament) because it’s a big event. So when creating a merchandise game for such events, these people should be considered the primary audience before the core fans.

It’s on this understanding that sports game fans avoid the World Cup games every four years, and instead play the yearly releases. These games often enjoy a much larger development budget, yearly improvements to the mechanics (bringing the game ever closer to real life), and a vast array of clubs and international sides which should last any anyone until next year’s mechanic and roster update shakes things up again.

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