GoKawiilZenGM makes free sports simulation games. Set your roster, make trades, draft prospects, manage your finances, and try to build a dynasty. Try our games now in your browser: Basketball GM , Football GM , ZenGM Baseball , and ZenGM Hockey .
How it feels to be an old school web-based sports sim dev when tons of vibecoded web-based sports sims are being released
- AI
Meta June 12, 2026
Back when I started working on the web-based version of Basketball GM in 2012, web development was very different. npm was brand new and hardly anyone used it. Bundling/deploying JS was very primitive, a lot of people still were just concatenating files together. And things like TypeScript, React, async/await... these did not even exist yet!
It was really difficult! The tools and documentation were horrible compared to today. But I thought it'd be really cool if I could make BBGM run in a web browser, so I persevered. And over time the web dev ecosystem blossomed into what it is today: certainly far from perfect, but worlds better than it was in 2012.
In 2021 BBGM was big enough to become my full time job. That has gone really well! Today it is both more popular and more profitable than it was in 2021.
At times over the past several years I've wondered how long will that really last.
Will people get bored of BBGM? Video games normally don't remain popular for many years, but sports are special. As long as basketball is popular, people will want to play basketball video games. Of course everyone knows that, just look at the annual Madden and 2k releases that are always super popular. Sports management sims are a smaller niche than those mainstream games, but still a profitable niche for me and several other game developers. Which also made me wonder...
Will someone release a game so much better than BBGM that I lose all my users? The 2k to my Live? Why hasn't that happened?
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