 We don't know that in NBA 2K, VC's been getting more and more expensive. The question that no one's asked till just now is just how expensive? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I did the math and this is what I found out. I got this idea because I was on Twitter and I bumped into an article from NLSC and they said this, again, there's a new game every year. And if you're used to the grind and not inclined to look back at older titles, it's easy to forget how much items and upgrades used to cost in previous iterations of my career. In fact, I'd suggest that 2K is counting on that, which is true. We'll keep track of all the different ways that VC's been valued less and less. So I did it. First of all, y'all should know that every NBA 2K past 2K20, the servers is not existing. And because the servers are off, I'm relying on YouTube videos from OG content creators like Shake & Bake and Chris Moove to get my data. I then took that data and put it on this big Google Sheets charts and I day created graphs because nobody likes looking at numbers. Everybody likes graphs. This is facts. And with this article claiming that the price of VC has doubled, like it costs two times as much to reach 86 overall right now than it did in 2K14, this is definitely worth investigating, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, so the first way that 2K has made VC more expensive is by just changing the VC prices. In my handy-dandy spreadsheet, you can see that in NBA 2K13, the most VC you can purchase was 10,000. That 10,000 VC cost you three buckaroos. In NBA 2K13, they just introduced the concept of VC. People who played online used VC as their form of currency to upgrade their player. And people who played offline used skill points, which was like the tradition in 2K. Skill points was something that everybody was familiar with. It wasn't until NBA 2K14 here where everybody made the transition to VC. You can play with VC even if you're playing offline my careers. The transition from 2K13 to 2K14 saw a 33% increase in VC prices. Not just that, the highest amount you could actually order from the PlayStation Store was no longer 10,000. It was now 50,000, and that cost $10. And as I was digging in the archives, I found myself a little jet. So right here's a new feature what the developers gave to us. Real easy, you can purchase 5K, 10K, 20K, and 50K, real easy guys. Yeah guys, that is, I'm not trolling a 30 second video from 2014 Cash Nasty showing us how to purchase VC. If you guys weren't around back in the old days of the NBA 2K community, this move was actually celebrated. People that didn't have time to sit there and grind 20, 30 hours to get badges and attribute upgrades, welcome the addition of VC because now you can purchase real world money for in-game progress. The problem is 2K didn't know where to stop. The jump from 2K 14 to 2K 16 saw another 30% increase in the price of VC. But from 2K 16 to 2K 22, the prices at least in America have stayed the same. If my memory serves me correctly because it's the Canadian dollar lost a little bit of value, the prices went up in Canada and the likelihood that the prices went up in other currencies around the world is also high. But in North America, the prices have stayed the same. Not North America, sorry. Canada's part of North America. Damn, fuck, geography, America. Damn, I live here for fucking two and a half years. I already forgot where the rest of the world's at. But when everyone thinks about the value of VC, the first thing that comes to your mind in my mind is how much does it cost to upgrade your player? Because for the history of 2K, whether or not you started at a 40 overall or a 60 overall in your My Player or My Career story, the try-hards who had money and could afford it could just purchase VC and on day one upgrade their player to a 85 or 86 overall. This is actually where it gets interesting and I wanted to keep the numbers consistent because depending on the bill that you made the numbers vary. So for the purposes of this video, I went through Chris Moves' entire catalog and I just kept track of the players that he built and how much VC he spent on his characters. He makes the same bill basically every single year so it stays consistent. In NBA 2K14, the price was 65,000, jumped up to 100,000 in 2K15. 155,000, 146, 188. And for the most part up until now, NBA 2K22 has been hovering around just about the same. And I put it into a graph just because I'm a visual learner. Some of y'all might be visual learners. We could see oh so clearly that this line is trending up for its ladies and gentlemen. And from 2K14 all the way until NBA 2K22, it costs three times more now than it did back then to get your player to a 85 overall, three times. But the numbers actually get more interesting than that because to get from 60 to 85 overall is one thing but it seems that the extremes have been getting worse and worse in a video I dropped like a month ago, I showed you guys a screenshot of Flawless who tweeted this, 270,000 VC to max my player out. Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark. So yeah, although the average is still about 200,000, depending on the bill that you make, it could be significantly more expensive than that. So to get from 60 to 85 overall from 2K14 to now that saw a three times multiplier on the price. But to get from 85 overall to 99 overall between 2K17 till now, that saw an 87% increase because in NBA 2K17 it cost Chris move 240,000 to upgrade his character fully maxed out 99 overall. Now it runs you anywhere from 400 to 500,000. So if you weren't paying attention, you would think like, man 2K actually didn't change the price of VC this year, but upon closer analysis, you see they just found new ways and new creative ways to do what they've always been doing. So then I thought, okay, what are the best ways that people earn VC, right? If you don't want to have to pay VC, you want to earn your VC. Well, historically people just played my career to do that. They would grind my career, get their badges, attribute some VC. Well, I took the luxury of going through Chris moves entire catalog of videos. I went to the first NBA game he played and I just jotted down how much VC Chris move earned. In NBA 2K13, it was a whopping 296. In 2K14, 592. Some serious increases in 2K15 all the way till 1306. And with the exception of 2K17 and 18, it hovers around just about that basically up until now. 17 and 18 being interesting years because if you guys were part of the community back then, you fully remember the heat that 2K was taking, everything from haircuts to the park events they were monetizing, the boosts and the park cards, from industry geeks to players alike, 2K was getting heavy criticism for their egregious microtransactions in those years. So in 2K19 to combat that, it's almost as if they reverted Chris move earning 1,283 and it's been about the same basically since then. And if you wanted to see that in graph form, ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like. So in all reality, if the community never said nothing in 2K17 and 2K18, it had been raps because if my career is the best way for people to earn VC, they were ready to decimate that. It wasn't until there was a serious outward in the community that we saw a spike back up in 2K19. That on top of the fact that 2K has a history of nerfing your VC badge and attribute progress. For some reason, when there's something wrong with the game and the gameplay, we take our dear time fixing that right there. But if there's a VC glitch of any magnitude, next day it's patched. They take that stuff seriously, I get it. It affects their bottom line at the end of the day. And 2K takes this microtransaction stuff like 2 to T, ladies and gentlemen. If you ever just sat down and read any of their very public earning reports, because they do have to publish them, this is a publicly traded company, they brag about how much money they're able to earn in microtransactions across all their titles. But it actually doesn't stop there, it gets worse. Because you might think, okay, if I'm a really good player, I probably don't even need to play my career, I'll just play stage, I'll play Antio. Well over the history of NBA 2K, the stage nerds have had to fight for their ability to keep the stage. And I'm not gonna lie, this information was very hard to come by because the servers aren't up. In 2K 13 and 14, there was no stage, but in 2K 15 was the introduction of stage, not only the stage where you can bet VC in your games to earn money, but there was always a high roller. So if you wanted to play even higher stakes, you can do that too. In 2K 16, they completely removed the high rollers. In 17, due to popular demand, they brought it back as an event, so it wasn't 24 seven. And it stayed either an event or non-existent in NBA 2Ks ever since. Not just that, the highest amount that you can bet in the stage has been changing every single year as well. If you look at this very beautiful graph I made to visually show you what the fuck I'm talking about, you can see it's trending downward. In some of these years, players have had to fight for their ability to even increase these amounts. I think it was 2K 18 or 19, where the amount was like God awful low. And because the community complained so much, 2K eventually added prices to the VC counts, so people can bet more on the stage. Because the people who played a game the most to try hard to win games on the stage and earn millions of VC, those are what they call in the industry sharks. And sharks are the people usually that make the entity the most money, in this case, NBA 2K. So 2K doesn't want the sharks in NBA 2K earning all this VC for free, because these are the same people who will be very willing, due to their commitment, to pay for VC. So they're incentivized to want to limit the amounts people can win on the anti-up. And they do this in creative ways. Have you ever played an anti-up game? If you have, you know that there's a tax. And not a real life tax, where like the government uses it to build roads and infrastructure, so civilization can continue. But in NBA 2K, the tax actually serves no purpose at all. It doesn't benefit the players in any way whatsoever. It exists merely to siphon more VC from players who play on the stage. From 2K17 to NBA 2K22, 2K saw a 60% decrease. So while you could play for 25,000 on the high rollers back in the day, now the most you could play for so far on 2K22 is 10,000. And same with me now, ladies and gentlemen, it continues to get worse. Years ago, 2K introduced the concepts of boosts. You can get jump shot boosts and blocking boosts and defense boosts and all of that. You can pay for these upgrades to get a plus five to all of those individual attributes. In NBA 2K22, if you wanna get all your Gatorade and attribute boosts, it will cost you 2,700 VC each game. If you do some quick math, that's 270,000 for 100 games. Of course, the alternative of that is to win an event where unlimited boosts is the reward. But one, those are hard to do because a lot of the people who win it just cheat. But two, that means that you basically have to play the game either all day and all night to win these events or have to just play at a disadvantage if you don't wanna fork up the money. And it's no secret that all the clothing they add into the game have been getting more and more expensive year over year. I made a video a month ago, like sounding the alarm bells that 2K might've just slid in another pay to win method in NBA 2K22. Because if you guys remember in the road to 40, level 40 in season one, you can win shooting sleeves that give you a plus something attribute boost to your player. So I said, it's only a matter of time before they make it so that you can buy those things in the store. And now you're paying VC for what? More attribute boosts. So when you look at a graph like this and you think, oh, okay, so maybe 2K can't continue to push the amount of VC required to create a new build because we're all keeping an eye on that. We would get frustrated if 2K changed that. 2K is getting more and more creative in their implementation so you won't even realize that it's happening because as the article said in the beginning, most of y'all don't go back and check these games to see just how cheap things were in the past. Because in a regular economy, like in America, there's inflation and inflation helps stimulate the economy and get the ball rolling. But in a virtual video game where there's no economy, inflation serves no purpose. And so then you have to ask yourself, why is there inflation? So let's do the math. You wanna purchase NBA 2K22 and max out a player. That's gonna cost you a total of 450,000 VC. It's gonna cost you 30 hours of gameplay. It's gonna cost you $70 for the cross-gen version of the game and over $170 in VC. So you might think to yourself, all right, so I don't wanna spend my money. That sounds like a lot of money to spend on a game, especially considering that's only one maxed out player. I'm just gonna grind for it in the game, agent, how long would that take? Well, I went through a catalog of Chris Moe videos and I did the mathematical analysis, assuming no incentives and you're playing on 12 minute quarters, you can make 106,000 VC every my career season. That means for one fully maxed out player, you have to play four and a half seasons of 12 minute quarters my career. Either that or you fork up $170 in VC. So it's not even that VC is just an avenue for you to upgrade your player, but you can also grind it. It's gotten to the point where grinding it isn't even a realistic alternative. You can only really buy VC. And I'm talking about the park. Can you imagine if you needed to get 200,000 VC for one box where you know you're not gonna get your money back on it? It's worse in other game modes like my team. I understand needing to make money and the video game industry is vicious, but how 2K has creatively included micro transactions to the point where we don't even notice is a masterclass on monetizing an audience. It is the exact definition of pay to win. And the reality is, this is just a tip of the iceberg. You can click on this video right here and watch me become a level 10 model in NBA 2K 22. And you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It costs a lot, ladies and gentlemen. The creativity is there. Click on the video, man. Appreciate you all watching. Let me know what you have to feel in the comments below. Well, everyone's gonna feel the same way, but... I'll catch you guys in the next one.