The NBA trade that sent Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 2 sparked intense fan discussion about team management—and drove transformative traffic to the free browser-based video game Basketball GM.
The game, a niche basketball front office simulator, saw a near-immediate 50% rise in user activity. A screenshot of its trade engine calling what Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison offered the Lakers “crazy” gathered hundreds of upvotes on Reddit and contributed to snowballing growth, as people sought a taste of the hot seat experience.
Visitors have stuck around, according to the game’s independent creator Jeremy Scheff, and Basketball GM is on pace to smash its previous single-year record of 4.9 million user sessions as it maintains heightened engagement levels four months after the stunning Mavericks-Lakers swap.
Indie games are broadly capitalizing as affordable development tools proliferate, social media platforms organically spread awareness about charming titles and users push back against big-budget companies that hawk in-game purchases. In 2024, indie games accounted for 48% of total platform revenue within the PC marketplace Steam, according to Statista data.
But Scheff, a one-man team who refuses to implement microtransactions into his games, is an uncommon winner from the sports genre, where game popularity is heavily influenced by which publishers own official licensing deals with leagues. These agreements provide exclusive rights to use real team names and logos—a key selling point to consumers.
Electronic Arts, which took about 73% of its $7.56 billion in 2024 revenue from in-game purchases, is essentially unopposed in NHL, PGA, UFC, WWE, NFL and NCAA football video game sales thanks to its exclusive licensing agreements. Take-Two Interactive, which like EA gets about three-quarters of its revenue from in-game add-ons, dominates the NBA market without competitive threat from another AAA offering.
The prevailing one-company-per-sport model marks a shift from the early 2000s, when major leagues had multiple publishers creating officially licensed games for consoles.
“The consolidation, the sort of monopolizing into one main maker of each sports game, is extremely unfortunate, because, of course, it damages competition,” Rick Brown, a former game designer at EA and Take-Two, said in an interview. “[Competition] is where you find the beautiful things. You need to have a David to try to chase the Goliath.”
EA declined to comment on this story. Take-Two did not respond to a request for comment.
A pair of front-office simulator games hold additional paid licensing agreements with major U.S. leagues: Out of the Park Baseball with MLB and Football Manager with MLS. Both titles are owned by conglomerates. Com2uS oversees Out of the Park Baseball, which currently grosses about $1 million in annual revenue, per VG Insights. Sega-owned Football Manager, more popular in Europe than the U.S. because of its league licenses across the Atlantic, grosses over $30 million.
Without the money of a corporate-backed studio, Basketball GM operates on a much smaller scale. Still, it has gained a cult following among hoops fans, partly because no one has acquired an official NBA license in the front-office simulator niche.
Scheff’s game generates annual revenue in the low six figures from on-site advertisements—an amount that let him quit his job as a data scientist in 2021 and enables his pregnant wife to stay home to care for their toddler. The user activity generated from the real-life Doncic trade could help push his earnings higher.
It’s in the Game
Compared to blockbuster sports video games such as Take-Two’s NBA 2K franchise, Basketball GM looks like a barebones relic of a bygone era. The game boils down to static words and numbers on a screen—basic tools Scheff must maximize.
From the start—Scheff wrote the first line of code in 2008—he envisioned a product that emphasized the fun parts of running a professional basketball team such as trades and drafts. He also made it simple enough for the average sports fan to pick up quickly and included a splash of personality.
Among Basketball GM’s customizations and quirks: Users can set year-over-year inflation rates within their world or enable the simulator to spit out the occasional untimely death of a star.
Scheff recently coded Basketball GM to generate family members of players over time. This includes children and siblings. Scheff then implemented mood boosts for players who are teammates with a family member; mood ratings are particularly important when it comes to contract negotiations and can be the driving factor behind a team-friendly deal that keeps an organization under the luxury tax threshold. Another update ensures the cartoon headshots of relatives resemble one another.
“You’re never done,” Scheff said in an interview. “It can always be better. It can always be more realistic. A game can always be more fun, or could run faster, you know, look better, the UI can be better.
“I could say, ‘Well, yeah, it’s way better than I ever imagined. That’s pretty cool. People like it.’ But there’s also a lot of things I can look at and say, ‘That really should be better, that shouldn’t work that way, that kind of sucks about it, or that could be more realistic, or more fun.’”
Screenshot of Basketball GM
Community Powered Growth
Like most other successful indie games without a marketing budget, Basketball GM’s growth began at a snail’s pace.
For more than a decade, Scheff tinkered with the general manager simulator in the background as he earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rutgers and spent about seven years as a data scientist for a drug development services company.
Around 2013, he shared his game development progress in a Reddit post, which helped bump its then-nonexistent user count to about 50 people. By the late-2010s, Google search referrals and word-of-mouth through social media brought the game enough activity that he would occasionally raise it as a topic of conversation to people in his real-life social circle. In 2021, with revenue roughly equaling his data-scientist earnings, and as COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns supercharged video game interest, Scheff quit his day job to work full time on game development.
Basketball GM now boasts a devoted online Reddit community of more than 32,000 members who discuss game play and praise his commitment to product development. They also compliment Scheff for not using the microtransactions omnipresent in big-budget sports games.
With a fresh crop of users trying out Basketball GM since the Doncic trade, feedback continues to trend positive.
In a Reddit post about his basketball game with over 550 upvotes, a user wrote, “My man built the best NBA sim I own, made it completely free, consistently updates it, makes it easily customizable for pretty much whatever, and takes the time to reply to individual comments on the subreddit despite his game amassing millions of users.”
Scheff called the sudden rise in attention surreal.
“I’m not the person who’s supposed to be a social media presence,” Scheff said. “I’m introverted. I’m not going out to be some social media influencer. But then, to a very small extent, I guess I somehow am now, because I have this community.”
Forward Outlook and Challenges
Getting noticed is step one for any indie developer. Maintaining a sustainable business model and fending off competitive threats presents a different test.
In the early days, Basketball GM’s straightforward structure made it easier for Scheff to work on the game in his free time as he pursued a separate career. The simulator’s underlying technology is basic by design—it stores game play progress locally on user browsers, keeping Scheff’s server costs low while allowing people to play offline.
His keep-it-simple approach creates disadvantages, though. There is no mobile-first version of the game, or any easy way to transfer franchise progress between devices. Going forward, well-resourced competitors could capitalize on Scheff’s tech sacrifices, particularly if they manage to strike an official licensing deal with the NBA.
Scheff said fatherhood presents an additional challenge. Toddlers are not conducive to grinding for a dozen consecutive hours in front of a home computer. He acknowledged his focus has sometimes waned of late.
Each tide of new users brings more messages to respond to and greater expectations to deepen the simulation experience. Scheff feels pride but also weight.
Still, he does not expect to hire a first employee. With just him on the project, he can stomach ad market downturns by dipping into his savings. Having someone else on the payroll would bring additional responsibility—and, in his opinion, temptation to chase more revenue sources.
“I would feel a lot more pressure to make money,” Scheff said.
If the ad revenue that feeds his family completely tanks, Scheff would consider strategic business adjustments. That might include listing his collection of simulators on a prominent gaming app marketplace like Steam—rather than just web browsers—where other indie titles have boosted their reach. He could also add more prominent donation cues for regular visitors.
Scheff prefers to keep his current business model intact, careful to not stretch himself thin or upset his loyal users. At least in the short term, he is doing well enough to maintain the status quo.
Thanks to the real-life Doncic trade that elevated NBA fan interest in being a general manager, this year is likely to be his best yet.
“What I’m making is not a trivial amount of money,” Scheff said. “It’s not obvious to me that [any other way] would be better. … I’m going to try to not mess with a good thing as long as I can.”
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