How Playground Productions brought Backyard Sports back

Backyard Baseball '97 went back on sale in October 2024, twenty-seven years after it first shipped. Five more Backyard Sports games followed it, an animated special has aired, and in July the franchise got its first original game in over a decade.

All of it comes from Playground Productions, the company Lindsay Barnett founded to bring the series back.

How this started

Barnett had been an elementary school teacher. During the pandemic she was looking for computer games her students could play that were made for children and not full of things she would have to explain to a parent, and she kept coming back to the games she had played herself.

Tracking down who actually owned Backyard Sports took work. The franchise had sold millions of copies in the late 1990s, but the rights had passed through enough hands that the trail had gone cold, and Barnett went as far as hiring a private investigator to follow it. She founded Playground Productions and bought the rights in 2024.

The first re-release, Backyard Baseball '97, arrived that October. Five more followed: Backyard Soccer '98, Backyard Football '99, Backyard Basketball '01, Backyard Baseball '01 and Backyard Hockey '02.

Getting them running again was its own problem. The original source code was gone. Playground worked with Mega Cat Studios to reverse-engineer the games from the shipped builds, which is closer to archaeology than porting.

What they built after that

The re-releases were the foundation. What sits on top of them is a media company.

A new Backyard Baseball, the first original game in the franchise since 2015, came out on 9 July 2026 for Windows and macOS, with console versions to follow. Mega Cat Studios developed that one too. An animated special has already aired, with Tiffany Haddish and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in the cast, and it screened at Dave & Buster's locations before a wider release. On mobile, the company has added live competitive features to Backyard Baseball '97 with a global leaderboard.

Barnett has kept the company independent through all of it. In her words, they get to make the choices that matter to them.

That is unusual. Reviving a dormant franchise is exactly the situation where a company normally takes outside money and loses control of the thing it set out to protect.

Why we are writing this

We should say what we do before we go any further.

CyberScope is an incentives consultancy in Türkiye. We help software companies and game studios claim cash back from a Turkish government programme. So when we read about a company like Playground, we look at the cost side of the business, because that is the side the programme pays for.

Under Decision No. 10962, Türkiye refunds a percentage of three costs every games business carries: the commission the storefronts take, the money spent on marketing abroad, and the servers. Article 22 covers App Store, Google Play, Steam and comparable platforms, so a company shipping across mobile, PC and console is claiming on all of it. The refund is cash into the company's bank account, paid against invoices already settled, and it does not depend on the company making a profit.

The United States refunds none of it.

The assumptions

Playground has not shared any financial information with us, and none of what follows comes from them.

The figures below are ours. They describe a company with a catalogue of re-releases, one major new title in the year, and marketing behind a franchise relaunch. If the real numbers are half of these, halve the results.

Those three lines cost $2.10M a year as things stand. From a Turkish company the store commission comes back at 50 percent, advertising at 70 percent because the United States is on the Ministry's target country list, and hosting at 50 percent. The same spending nets out at $810k.

None of it is capped. The standard programme limits support to 20 million lira a year on store commissions, 50 million on advertising and 5 million on hosting, and a company spending at this level stays well underneath. Every line comes back at the full rate.

Figures use 47.7 lira to the dollar. Caps are revalued upward every year, so they grow with inflation.

The part that fits this company specifically

Playground is building a franchise across games, television and film at the same time, with a small team and no outside owner telling it what to prioritise.

That is the position where reimbursed marketing spend matters most. An independent company relaunching an IP is spending heavily on getting attention, and it is spending that money before the revenue arrives. Getting 70 percent of it back changes how large a campaign the company can justify for the next release, which for a franchise revival is the whole game.

What it would actually take

None of this happens by filing a form.

It needs a Turkish operating company doing real work in Türkiye: staff, a registered address, books, and invoices in the company's name. That is a structural decision about where part of the business sits, and it is a longer conversation than a blog post.

Ownership is not a factor. A company owned entirely by American shareholders claims on exactly the same terms as a Turkish one. The programme exists to grow Türkiye's service exports and is indifferent to who owns the exporter.

We have written about what a Turkish company actually costs to run and how the app store commission claim works.

To the team at Playground

You saw what a dormant franchise was still worth, tracked the rights down and got them back, and rebuilt the games when the original code was gone. You have kept the company independent through all of it. The costs of relaunching an IP are the costs Türkiye was built to refund, and at your scale none of them are capped.

We would like to run the model on your real numbers instead of our guesses. It takes about 20 minutes, we will show you the working, and you will get a figure you can take to your board. Book a call and we will put it together.