Over the years of reviewing NBA 2K games, I’ve come to appreciate – and even look forward to – the game that in many ways feels like a true love letter to basketball. This has been a consistent attribute of the series for over a decade. NBA 2K not only embodies basketball culture; It helps shape it. No other game offers an overall experience as immersive and rewarding as NBA 2K, although Madden takes the lead by simulating America’s unique obsession with football. That’s why, in addition to my review of NBA 2K25 – so as not to get bogged down in the details – I’m also taking a moment to address the unfortunate pay-to-win economy that still exists. ?
If you don’t play NBA 2K, you may not be familiar with its struggles in this regard, and if you do, you may have normalized it to the point where you no longer see it as an issue. Unlike other sports games, Visual Concepts built the MyCareer mode and social MMO hub The City to provide a compelling – and somehow, over the years, still unrivaled – tandem appeal in the world of sports games.
Players create characters like a role-playing game and decide on builds, which determine how the player performs on the court. From there, they can follow a narrative-driven story mode, join an NBA team and play out multiple seasons of their career, and most importantly, jump into the city’s thriving gaming community. The shared social space offers an impressive array of activities, such as limited-time events, impromptu matches on the street court, competitive 5v5 games with dedicated groups of teammates, and more. This year, they can even compete in go-kart racing.
City and MyCareer combine to create the deepest sports gaming experience on the market, but every year it’s stymied by a community that’s been taught to spend the extra money to make their custom players competitive, or else be drowned out by others People are getting successful through virtual swiping of their debit cards in the ocean. This is because MyCareer players perform poorly on the pitch in their debut – an overall rating of 60 (OVR) – and in-game money, called Virtual Currency (VC), can be used to improve MyCareer players instead Used to improve the performance of MyCareer players. The community is so attuned to this reality that in my experience it’s rare to see many players in their 60s even on launch day.
While this is certainly not true, Feel It’s like everyone spends a little extra to get their players to OVR where they can compete with others online, and the social pressure implicit in the game through years of carefully crafted choices means the issue feels almost never be improved. On launch day, I waited by the subway tunnels in the city where players were arriving, trying to spot those players whose banners said OVR was still hovering around 60 or even 70. It’s rare that I find one, and when I do, they’re all standing still, which suggests that the humans on the other end were probably there buying their VC back then so they could upgrade their players.
Players who choose not to invest in VC will start the game at 60 OVR and must slowly improve through the game, risking being excluded from friends and teammates who spend more and are unwilling to have lower-level players on their team. One player pays only At $70, NBA 2K might make the game more difficult for everyone. If you’re one of 10 people in a PvP game on launch day, and 9 of them have an OVR over 80, and your OVR is 60, you’re going to have a terrible time, and you’re going to have a worse experience with your teammates. . By 2024, the NBA 2K community seems to have adapted to this reality, spending only as much money as they need to remain viable as players.
For this year’s review, I tried a new approach in which I didn’t spend any of the 100,000 VC (about $30 worth) that came with my review copy of the game so I could better experience it as a 60-year-old OVR players try to make my players better by training, playing different modes, and other ways. I don’t find this game fun at all. In PvP, I’ve always been a source of frustration to my teammates because I couldn’t cover the better players on the other team, whether they were humans or the game’s CPU boss. In a mode where you can see other people’s OVR ratings, some people quit the match very quickly, maybe because they didn’t want me to get in trouble.
Other modes hide this number, but in my experience, my players’ lower symbol cap means they quickly come to the same conclusion. I was basically picked last for gym class because I didn’t want to spend another $30 or more to get my players competent. Even in individual career games, it feels like being stuck with the Pistons last season. Within 48 hours I gave in and used my VC to buy better attributes for my players so I could accomplish anything important in the game.
If everyone was in the same situation, the slow grind from 60 OVR to something better would be enjoyable. Instead, the game’s servers came online, and before players could do anything else, a significant number of them seemed to immediately purchase large amounts of in-game gold that could fill Scrooge McDuck’s coffers. To me, it’s worth noting that the annualized version of the game, which this year is called the All-Star Edition, is $100 and comes with enough VC to get players to about 80 OVR, and there are still many players who spend more for it, Because you can easily find players going beyond 85 or even 90 OVR immediately. Gamers and media often discuss how many major games have seen their price expectations rise to $70, but NBA 2K appears to be the first sports game to actually go above $100. Paying less than this while being interested in the game’s best modes can lead to frustration and rejection.
This ties into an article I wrote last year in which I lamented that sports games could get away with things like this while other games couldn’t. Most people won’t try it, and when others Do Sometimes try it, like when Strike Force 2 made some heroes payable, or when Star Wars: Battlefront 2 offered gameplay-changing upgrades in the form of microtransactions, and it usually doesn’t take long before a disapproving player base forces them to Make changes. I know the cost of making a video game of this caliber is prohibitive, so I’ve always been pleased with the ample cosmetic DLC options. Heck, I spent a lot of money on games like Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, and even NBA 2K buying visually cool styles for my avatar. I even found NBA 2K’s city mode to look like a virtual shopping mall—partly because it’s cleverly rendered as a beach boardwalk in this year’s game so it doesn’t feel like a giant pop-up ad. But once you allow a game’s currency to impact gameplay as dramatically as NBA 2K has for years, a line has definitely been crossed.
I feel like these economic issues are not an option for Visual Concepts, which is probably closer to what the publisher wants. The Visual Concepts team clearly loves basketball, and I truly look forward to hearing about all the cool new things they’re doing in the NBA 2K series every year. This year’s game is no different, and you should read my full review of NBA 2K25 to get a broader sense of just how great other aspects of the game are. It’s truly unique in many ways and feels like a sports game that I could play forever and never run out of fun things to do. Unfortunately for most players, there’s a costly hurdle they have to overcome each year before they step onto the field.
