MotoGP 25 devs discuss the difficulty of improving an annual franchise every year, and the sheer level of efficiency it demands

Annual franchises aren’t that common in the games industry, especially annual games from one specific studio. Call of Duty is an annual franchise split across numerous developers, but sports games like EA Sports FC, NBA 2K and Milestone’s MotoGP 25 are titles helmed by single teams that live and die based on their regular yearly releases.

In an interview with VideoGamer, we sat down with game director Matteo Pezzotti and lead game designer Stefano Talarico to discuss the difficulties of improving an annual franchise year-over-year. As most games now take longer than ever to complete, MotoGP 25 was a challenge that not only saw the team refine and improve the game, but also move over to an entirely new engine to ensure its future.

“It’s difficult from two points of views,” Pezzotti told us. “The first one, obviously, is timing because you have just one year to make another game. Not from scratch, but you know that you have to do something new, propose something new, to the player because you cannot sell [the same game every time.”

Pezzotti explained that the team has “a lot of ideas for the next five years” of MotoGP, and those long timelines are important as the team builds and iterates year-on-year. While there may be a great idea now, it may take a few entries to finally be implemented, but the team is always thinking of something new.

For MotoGP 25 specifically, the team’s second major difficulty is keeping its improvements in line with reality. Based on a real sport and using a license for that sport, the developers have to evolve alongside the real events. If something major happens in real life, it’s essential for that change to be reflected in the game.

“We can take inspiration also from reality for creating a new feature,” the team explained. “For example, last year, we added the introduction of the Riders Market… and we already know that in [2027], there would be a great change in the championship with the new bikes.”

Keeping in line with reality can often be a challenge, especially with the tight deadlines of the MotoGP series. Making any game annually in the modern games industry requires dedication and efficiency unlike any other, and any last-minute changes to reality have their effect on the game.

“It’s kind of difficult to find a balance… following the regulation,” we were told. “Maybe next year will be a new track in the calendar, so you will have to add that. It brings so [many] days of work that you have to plan, of course, and besides that you will also have to improve the game because of course you you can’t give the players the same thing over and over so you will have to balance everything and deliver something that is better than the past one.”

The team at Milestone always has a roadmap that allows the team to decide where to focus on new features and where to focus on iterative improvements. It is not an easy process, but the team has worked hard to make sure that the iterative experience is as efficient as possible.

Milestone, and every developer working on an annual franchise, works to do what is increasingly becoming the impossible. As the average game development time increases exponentially with some titles taking almost a decade to complete, these teams are pushed to the limit to release one game a year which, for many, is how it used to be.

We’ve seen what can happen when the efficiency of annual development slips. Just this year, Sports Interactive’s Football Manager 25 missed its release date and required a major delay. By the time the game would’ve been ready to release, it would only be months until FM26 would’ve been scheduled to launch. At that point, the team decided to miss a year, which resulted in a major loss of revenue. Every annual franchise is on the verge of this happening if efficiency slips, and Milestone has worked hard to make sure its franchise doesn’t slip up.