[Syd Thrift]

Puresim was an interesting game but the creator just plain wasn't able to make a release every year and for that reason, practically by itself, it fell behind OOTP. PS was created by a modder of Front Page Sports and IIRC used similarly physics-adjacent ratings for the players, which TBH I kind of still prefer over the OOTP "these ratings directly create these stats" model. Still, OOTPD even back in the early 2000s was pretty vigilant about getting more and more stuff into each edition and they leveraged the increase in fanbase to hire more devs to do more stuff whereas Mogul remains a one-man affair (spread out between several games at that; I've picked up Football Mogul a few times and always wind up being disappointed at the lack of progress).

I honestly don't think that the license alone is a killer. I do think it puts new creations at a disadvantage. Frankly, another huge, huge disadvantage is all the work that OOTP has done over the years with bells-and-whistles type stuff like graphics and FaceGen and so on. 20 years ago you could release and compete with a game that looked like nothing more than a bunch of spreadsheets. I'm not sure that's the case any longer, or to the extent that it is, the new batch-of-spreadsheets is going to have to be really innovative somewhere else (for instance, a true physics-based engine).