Could the next college sports video game...be collegiate volleyball?

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Last year, I bought myself a little present. My daughters have basically taken ownership of the family Nintendo Switch, and I wanted something to help break up long flights and airport delays. So I bought myself a Steam Deck.

A Steam Deck looks like a huge Switch, only instead of playing Nintendo games, it plays PC games. Most of the major releases that you could download from Steam and play at a desktop computer will run on the handheld device as well.

Of course, I don’t play most of those fancy PC releases. The two games that have gotten the most playtime on my deck are Stardew Valley and Balatro. Those are two indie games, with art that wouldn’t out of place from a Super Nintendo.

Why no sports games? Well, sadly, there aren’t a lot of options for sports gamers on the Steamdeck. EA has yet to release a PC version of their College Football series. While 2K is preparing to eventually make a college basketball title, one doesn’t currently exist. Beyond a handful of major studio releases (like NBA2K, Madden and EA FC), and a few management simulations from smaller studios (Football Manager, OOP Baseball, etc), there aren’t many other proven titles.

Honestly, there aren’t even that many indie titles. Certainly not as many for other genres, like RPGs, shooters, or platformers.

Since I’ve started writing about the college sports video game industry, I get reader or social media questions all the time about what other sports could eventually get a game. Will we ever see the return of a college baseball title? What about college soccer? Hockey?

It turns out, the answer might be a completely different sport. What about volleyball?

Killer Aces, currently scheduled for a 2026 release, is a competitive volleyball game, one that aims to combine the roster and business management aspects of a front office mode or Football Manager, with fast-paced action gameplay.

The game is being made by indie studio 26K, which is really a fancy way of saying Ryan Kamins. This is essentially a one-man project.

Kamins isn’t a stranger to game development (26K has released other sports projects, and Kamins has a long career in game development independent of his solo projects), or volleyball. “I’m from LA and played volleyball in high school,” he told me. “I was good, but not great.” Instead of playing D-I, he instead attended UC Santa Barbara, and played intramural ball.

The way Killer Aces is currently structured, the game won’t include college intellectual property. Instead, Kamins sees the game focusing on the experience of building a high-level international club team. Volleyball is a global game, after all, and Kamins sees strong potential consumer interest in multiple Asian countries, like South Korea and Japan, where the sport has cultural influence and commercial popularity.

But “the idea of working with college IP is very interesting”, he told me, and he’d love to find a way to marry the roster building mechanics of a college program with the arcade gameplay he’s already developing. “If the licensing money was right, we’d love to do it.”

As the popularity of volleyball, and particularly college women’s volleyball has exploded over the last few years, and with industry heavyweights EA and 2K unlikely to take on a completely new game project in the near future, perhaps colleges could be persuaded to use different licensing vehicles to get their IP into independent video games.

That might mean schools (and/or player) potentially being willing to accept a higher royalty rate, instead of a larger up-front payment, or schools being willing to take on some marketing efforts to help keep development costs down.

Big budget sports game development is very expensive and complicated, so much so that the number of studios who can realistically take on such a project can be counted on one hand. But if schools are willing to roll the dice on indie projects, and if consumers are willing to make those risks worth it, then schools could potentially enjoy significant recruiting and revenue advantages.

Only one way to find out! Killer Aces is currently scheduled for a 2026 early release, and will be available on PC.

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What else have we been working on?

It’s been a busy week here at Extra Points!

• We had our new teammate, KC, break down how an industry-shifting contract at Texas Tech is forcing administrators to rethink a lot of what they thought about NIL and budgeting:

• I dug into our massive FOIA database at the Extra Points Library to get the Football Operating Budget for FY24 for almost every single public school in D-1, from the FBS to FCS. The largest budget? Alabama, with over $113 million in football operational expenses. The smallest? Morehead State, with just $1.5 million. Here’s everybody in between.

• Hey, why is this rich dude in a polo shirt on my TV during football games, asking me to care about the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961? Good question. Here’s my explainer.

• You might have missed this from our sister publication, NIL-Wire, but I think this was the best thing written about last week’s Missouri/Kansas game.

• And I’ve had my head down on adding more features to the Extra Points Library. We’re now at over 8,200 total documents, with dozens of new additions this week. Beyond our budget rankings, we also have new contracts for ADs, ticketing providers, MMR services contracts, head coaches, and more.

I’m going to try and catch my breath this weekend, but we have stories coming on the drama with the SCORE Act, how college football awards are evolving, the EXTRA POINTS BOWL WATCH, and much, much more.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you on the internet