Say at least this much for Matt Brown, writer of the college sports-focused Extra Points newsletter: He is a fair-minded guy. You can safely bestow unto him the Ceremonial Scepter of Good Duderdom. Tuesday, Brown learned that ESPN, the all-powerful behemoth astride sports media in the Western world, made and published and advertised what is in effect a copy of his excellent Athletic Director Simulator 4000, a game he built from his own imagination, the maintenance of which requires ongoing care and attention. ESPN launched their competing game this week as a feature on their website, and though it looks different, it is substantially the same game. The URL, as has been pointed out by many fans of Brown's work, even says "athletic director simulator."
Reached by Defector Wednesday morning, Brown was noticeably less enraged by ESPN's behavior than was the reporter who'd called him. "I want to give people the benefit of the doubt," said Brown, while neither screaming nor chewing through a hardbound dictionary. "I could see them reasoning, Our graphic style is different from that thing, we're trying to reach a different audience, we have a different objective. And one person can't, you know, copyright or lay claim to the idea of a text simulator based on multiple choice questions, balancing a budget, approval rating, and Director's Cup rankings for an athletic department. One person can't really own that idea."
Maybe it is true that one person cannot own such a concept. What am I, a copyright lawyer? On the other hand, ESPN's maneuver seems underhanded, and even predatory. The presentation is superficially distinct, but their game utilizes the same basic format as ADS4000, and explores the very same dynamics and themes right down to the particulars. Of course, the newer game is supplied via ESPN's exponentially larger distribution platform, expressing a particularly grim reduction of fair market competition. It's hard to imagine how this could be entirely accidental, and indeed it seems not to have been: Brown told Defector that an ESPN reporter who he knew to be aware of his work offered a private apology Tuesday night.
ESPN otherwise denied taking any inspiration from Brown's work. "ESPN regularly produces gamifications like this college athletics administration game as part of our editorial coverage and visual storytelling. This game is an original design and production of ESPN,” said the company, in a statement reported by Awful Announcing. "He built an interesting game. We built a different game. We hope people play and enjoy both."
I am incapable of reading that statement without interpreting a sneer behind the word "interesting." Brown, meanwhile, confounds my negligible Sicilian blood, which is boiling, with his resolute chillness. "It's clearly not a one-to-one complete copy, though there's a lot of similarities," he explained to Defector, maddeningly. Brown said he took some time Wednesday morning to monkey around with ESPN's game, and has decided that the world can sustain both. "I don't think it was anybody's intention to completely plagiarize my thing. It would be a bad product if it was trying to do exactly what my thing does, but I don't think it's a bad product. It looks nicer than mine. It had better web developers than mine did."
Yes, sure, ESPN's game looks nice. Brown's game also looks nice! More to the point, it looks the way it does in large part because it was made on a tight budget by an independent developer pursuing his own great inspiration. Brown first developed his concept into a game way back in 2022. He'd taught himself to code, he possessed deep knowledge of the inner workings of college sports, and he was motivated to work on a game by a desire to share this knowledge, to make it teachable. He initially launched Athletic Director Simulator 3000 as a kind of a gag, but the rudimentary text-only game met with surprising approval and enthusiasm from his readers and various professional contacts. Brown next teamed with a 2-D game developer named Chris Hatten to expand ADS3000, and to give it, you know, graphics. When that worked out, Brown and Hatten expanded the concept further, and in early 2024 released ADS4000.
Brown is still down in the game's backend every week, adding new challenges matched to developments in and around college sports. Brown described for Defector the process of thinking through how to incorporate the ongoing tumult at Michigan into the scenarios posed by his simulator. Running ADS4000 is work, and Brown takes it very seriously.
This care and attention means that ADS4000 is a living, evolving simulator, not stuck lacking in any particular way that might motivate a user to cast about for an alternative. Frankly, the AAA game studios could stand to treat their products with this same level of dedication. To that point, ESPN's new game does not fill in spaces left unaddressed by Brown's game: It simply storms into the same space, larger not in scope but simply by dint of its enormous platform and powerful corporate backing.
Brown cannot afford to be very pissed about this. For one thing, there are only so many hours in a day; for another, he does not see much upside in trying to fight the Disney corporation. "I can't easily flip the double-bird at those guys," says Brown, with a chuckle. "I've gotten some text messages from people who say they are intellectual property attorneys and want to talk. And I'm like, God bless you, I don't want to do that." Brown acknowledges that it's a fight he would not expect to win; also, he just prefers not to be in a fight, in particular one that would pull in people at ESPN with whom he would prefer to stay on friendly terms.
Instead, he is picking out the positives. Maybe some number people at ESPN are newly aware of him today, and of Extra Points. Maybe the two largely overlapping products will improve the knowledge and savvy of fans of college sports. "Hey, if they want to do this thing because they have the admirable goal of helping people understand the House settlement, which is boring as shit, or the SCORE Act, which is boring as shit, they're trying to make people eat their vegetables, and they can trick people into eating vegetables by making a game, awesome!"
Also, not for nothing, the sudden brouhaha stirred by ESPN's announcement this week helped drive some fresh attention toward Athletic Director Simulator 4000. "We had to pay to upgrade our servers," Brown says. "We can report, over the last 24 hours—and you can use this exact quote—we saw a veritable shit-ton of growth." It cost him $200 to accommodate the sudden influx of concurrent users, says Brown, but he is hopeful that the unexpected exposure will pay a sustained dividend. The couple of days of heightened attention so far have added a whopping 7,500 new subscribers for Extra Points, an explosion of growth which helps me to understand some of Brown's superhuman equanimity.
For now, both games are free: Brown has turned off the paywall for ADS4000 for the rest of 2025. "I hope that many of those people stick around as free subscribers and play our other games and read our other stuff," Brown told Defector. "If that ends up happening then all will end well, because I'd much rather have this be my funnel for new growth than, like, pay money for Facebook ads."
