Video Game Titles that includes a Year After The Game Releases

This originated with the sports games. Most team sports have a season that starts roughly halfway through the year and ends the next year, with the regular season-long competition ending with the play-off period. This play-off period determines who wins the season, who qualifies for the international cup leagues (like Europe cup or Champion's League) and who is demoted, and as such is considered the most important part of the season. It made sense to let your game refer to the year that second half took place in.

In addition, most sports games need a couple months to get the final league lineups incorporated in the product that needs to get shipped to stores, so they release near the end of the year. In 1994, when FIFA 95 was the first game to mention a year, your game had to be finished at least a month or two before your release date, because you couldn't patch your games. This was a couple years before the internet was formalized, so you couldn't publish an automatic update, and games were incorporated into cartridges, which weren't easy to patch. You also needed a lot of time to build enough cartridges, because unlike later DVDs, these were essentially mini computers that needed to be assembled. FIFA 95 released in mid November 1994, and every sports game thereafter was pretty much required to use the same naming scheme, because the current year was already taken by the title beforehand, and an (XX-1)-XX naming scheme would be too confusing.

Then later, names in other genres started to take the same naming scheme.