After years of wishing that a properly made, in-depth basketball management simulation game existed, Jeremy Scheff decided to create one. The process wasn’t quick, taking several years of on and off work before Scheff had a product that matched his standards. Once the quality of the game reached a point where Scheff thought other people might play it, he introduced Basketball GM to the world through a simple post on the NBA subreddit two years ago:
“Hi guys. Because I’m a huge basketball nerd with too much time on my hands, I made Basketball GM, a basketball management simulation game. It’s kind of like Football Manager, or like MyGM mode in 2k. The difference is, it’s completely free and you can play as much as you want right in your web browser.”
Immediately, an initial user base formed and gradually grew. Just over a week ago, Scheff posted again on Reddit, and this time the response was much better, nearly doubling the number of users. Basketball GM now has about 2500 unique visitors a day, with the average person playing the game for around an hour.
“The user base – it’s not that well with just numbers, but they’re a fairly dedicated bunch, people who really like the game. I think that’s what’s going to happen with a game like this. It’s a niche market.”
The way the game works is simple. The user selects a team in Scheff’s basketball universe and becomes their general manager. From there, the simulation begins. Some of the tasks of the general manager include setting the roster, making trades, handling the draft, and signing free agents. The detailed gameplay combined with the accessibility of playing on a web browser without having to create an account is a big draw for consumers. Fans of the game have even created custom roster files with actual NBA players that anyone can download and import.
A big sticking point for Scheff is allowing people to play as much as they want for free. He has an opposition to the ‘freemium’ trend in the video game industry, where consumers can partially play for free but are charged for certain features.
“It rubs a lot of people the wrong way. It’s not really a great situation for the video game industry, I don’t think, because the economic incentives are not towards making a better game. I’m pretty resistant to add something that would tilt the incentives towards me having to make my game worse, but people have to do what they do to make a living.”
Basketball GM originated in the summer after Scheff completed his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering. He was going to begin pursuing his PhD in the fall and decided to use his remaining free time to hone his programming skills by creating a basketball simulation engine.
“It didn’t really make it that far, it was kind of in the intermediate phase for a while. I would come back to it and pick it up for a little bit, put it down for a little bit. It was really only after I coded it to the web based version that it is now where you just run it in your web browser, that I started promoting it a little bit more.”
Not knowing much about modern web development, Scheff’s original version of the game was a traditional desktop application that needed to be installed to run. It wasn’t until he taught himself JavaScript that Scheff was able to create the current iteration. Since the game runs in the user’s web browser, there is nearly no cost for Scheff, enabling him to make the game free.
“It was only in the past 3 years or so when browser technology advanced enough to make this feasible to do. The new HTML 5 stuff gives you a bunch more flexibility, still not as much flexibility as any desktop application, but it’s good enough. But, even that was an experiment where I didn’t know if it was going to work. I was thinking even if this doesn’t work out and if the stuff I’m working at in school doesn’t work out, I can maybe use these skills as a backup plan and the video game could be in my portfolio.”
Having the game in his portfolio actually helped Scheff get his current job at a pharmaceutical company. As part of the interview process, Scheff had to present a one-hour seminar about his past work. After outlining his previous research experience for the first half of the seminar, Scheff used the remainder of his time talking about Basketball GM.
“I got the most questions and the most positive feedback about my game. I was like woah, these people are pretty cool I guess. They didn’t care that I came into an interview for a data scientist position at a pharmaceutical company and talked about my video game.”
The research he did in grad school was actually pretty similar to the work he was doing for Basketball GM. While working on mathematical modeling in biology, Scheff found that measuring the interaction between different variables in complex systems became extremely difficult to interpret at a certain point. The same issues were appearing in his code.
“At some point it becomes too complicated, even if it is a thing that you built and you have all the code. I probably already have that problem myself. I can’t tell you exactly if a 90 rating in 3pt shooting is as valuable as a 90 rating in inside scoring. I don’t know. And I wrote the damn thing. That would kind of scare me sometimes. I would be working on some biological model during the day, and in the evening I’d be working on my video game, I’d be thinking like “this is the exact same problem.”
To keep his game as responsive as possible, Scheff puts an emphasis on minimizing the number of ratings he has in the game. He’s also extremely wary of adding too much micromanagement so as to keep the game simple enough for someone to easily simulate through the whole season if they wanted to. Nevertheless, Scheff keeps an open mind to the countless suggestions he receives through private messages or sees on the burgeoning Basketball GM subreddit.
“The level of complexity is about where I want it to be. I might add a couple odd features here and there. It’s very similar to Baseball Mogul, which was the main sports game I used to play before this. There’s a lot of complexity there, but it’s still simple to play, and that was one of the things I liked about that”
The never-ending list of possible improvements can become tiresome, but Scheff remains ecstatic that his side project has turned into a game that thousands of people are enjoying. Basketball GM has been through a long journey to get to where it is now but the future certainly looks bright for the game.
