【homo-eroticism define】

Professional sports are homo-eroticism definea big business in video games, but it's mostly thanks to licensing deals. Major League Baseball is set to change that in 2018.

Since 2014, the corporate side of the league has been relying on for-hire studios to drive its R.B.I. Baseballseries. But this March, R.B.I. Baseball 18will arrive as the product of a completely internal development team inside the MLB Advanced Media division of the company.

SEE ALSO: Philadelphia greased poles to stop Eagles fans from climbing them. It didn't work.

In a sprawling feature penned by Polygon's Samit Sarkar -- one of the most authoritative voices out there when it comes to sports video games -- we learn the new R.B.I.is built on many of the same ideas that went into past game.

Where Sony's PlayStation-exclusive MLB The Showattempts to approximate the experience of both playing on a professional baseball team andmanaging the business of said team, R.B.I.goes in the other direction. The Show is sim-heavy and platform-exclusive, RBI is accessible and platform-agnostic. The latest game works on the major gaming hardware of the moment -- PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and Android/iOS devices -- and the play is meant to be accessible for anyone.

It's priced accordingly, too. Past R.B.I. games landed at a budget price of $19.99. The new one costs a bit more -- $29.99 -- but that's largely because the team at MLB added a bunch of new elements to the game.

Mashable Top Stories Stay connected with the hottest stories of the day and the latest entertainment news. Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

There's a new Home Run Derby mode, complete with online leaderboards. There's also a new 10-year franchise mode. It's not built to track statistics from year-to-year, but it does allow players to update rosters on the fly based on the changing IRL game.

That's unusual for a sports sim, which usually locks the rosters in franchise mode to create your own sort of alternate reality pro league. Instead, R.B.I.gives players the choice of downloading MLB-issued roster updates and either overwriting existing franchise rosters or simply adding in any new players.

The game's franchise mode also fills the free agent pool with legends of the sport. There are more than 100 of them in all, split into two groups: Those that retired after 1990 and those that retired before.

The dev team also put a lot of time in on things like player animations, sound effects, and other aspects of the presentation, though you'll have to wait for closer looks at the game to see the results. In the past, MLB's outsourced R.B.I.games have drawn frequent criticism for their budget look and feel; as much as that's reflected in the pricing of those past games, it's an area MLB set out to improve, by its own admission.

The history of the R.B.I.series and baseball video games is quite a convoluted tale. You should definitely give Polygon's feature a thorough read if you want a better sense of the context that makes this big development for pro sports-inspired video games so important.

---

Featured Video For You

---

Adam Stern is a freediver, he can swim up to 300 feet underwater on a single breath

---

Topics Gaming

• Science
• Shopping
• Digital Culture
• Entertainment
• Life
• Tech
• Deals
• Games

• The Mismeasure of Media
• Crafty orangutan escapes his zoo enclosure because the apes have had it with our crap
• Donald Trump nicknames that did nothing to slow his authoritarianism
• Why is everybody so worked up about Donald Trump's Twitter account?
• Best travel deal: Score the Frontier Go Wild! summer pass for just $399
• Netflix’s ‘Formula 1’ series opens up a seemingly unapproachable sport
• 'Real Conversations of Grindr' reveals there's a long way to go with HIV stigma
• A militia group posted a 'call to arms' on Facebook. Now two people in Kenosha are dead.
• 'The Last of Us' Season 2, episode 3's opening credits has a heartbreaking change
• Ford parks itself as autonomous valet comes to the U.S.

• Eggs and Horses and Dreams by The Paris Review
• JBL portable speakers: Get a JBL Go 3 for 40% off
• Donald Trump's mugshot is here and it's scowly
• On Fasting by Kaveh Akbar
• Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now by Brian Cullman
• Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
• Match Group leans into AI with new team
• What is girl math? Here's how economic thinking can actually be fun.
• Inside 'Game Changer,' the internet's favorite game show
• Elon Musk 'considers' Alex Jones' return to X / Twitter

• The Baffler’s May Day Round Up
• NASA: Dwarf planet Ceres is an ocean world
• Angela Merkel just eye
• Did Trump just use the soundtrack of a kids' movie at his convention?
• Best Sony headphones deal: Over $100 off Sony XM5 headphones
• 'The Office' star Ed Helms on playing Andy Bernard and punching the wall
• Crafty orangutan escapes his zoo enclosure because the apes have had it with our crap
• Heroic pizza delivery guy delivers pizza in the middle of the G20 Hamburg riots
• Amazon Pet Day: All the best deals
• Chelsea Clinton just shut down Donald Trump's latest Twitter rant with a single tweet

• Researchers map the koala genome in the name of saving the species
• I 'walked' Boston Dynamics' robot dog around San Francisco
• But his emails! The internet roasts Donald Trump Jr. over Russia report.
• Bang & Olufsen's new wireless headphones are very beautiful, very pricey
• Shop the Shark FlexStyle for 20% off at Amazon
• Bella Thorne made $2 million in less than a week on OnlyFans
• A year later, injured turtle returns to man who fixed his shell
• Your 2020 voting center may be an NBA arena
• Shop Owala's Memorial Day Sale for 30% off tumblers
• This girl sneezed while taking a selfie and things went hilariously wrong