In January 2024, Phrenetic Sports released its first sports simulation game, College Football Coach Online. It’s been a huge success so far, with over 8000 coaches created. We took what we learned from building CFBCO and made an even better version of it: Armchair Coach: College Football. The features we couldn’t easily include in the online-only version of the game were included here, and 40 more schools were added on top of that. ACCF’s final release was last December, and since then, we’ve been hard at work on the next sports simulation game in our category, a game I’m happy to reveal today: Armchair Coach: College Basketball.
The number of schools you can play with are doubled from ACCF’s 120 to ACCB’s 240. Not only that, but there are 240 women’s programs with unique rosters and values that you can also play with. This game is us taking everything we’ve learned in the last year and a half and combining it all to make something bigger than any of us could have dreamed of when starting on CFBCO. I’m proud of all the work our developers put into this game and will strongly considering paying all of them bonuses (maybe, probably not).
The talk of the town last year in sports simulation was EA Sports College Football 25, which became the best-selling sports game of all time, not because it was particularly good, but because it was the first AAA college football game to come out in 11 years. Instead of fixing that game’s many bugs, EA will be releasing the game’s first $70 roster update next week ($100 for the suckers who want to play the game three days early), and it will make them lots of money and make their investors very happy as they continue to defile a brand that was once synonymous with quality. I want the people who want to play an actually good sports game when CFB26 inevitably disappoints them to have that option, and now, they’ll have three, including one in a sport that hasn’t had a AAA release in 16 years.
I can’t say where the Armchair Coach series will go from here. I’m happy with what we’ve put out, and I’d hate to send the developers I’ve built a strong relationship with over the last year and a half packing, but it’s also 2025, and firing game developers who devote their blood, sweat, and tears to you is kind of “in” right now. Expect further updates on that front in the future.
