 It been a super long time since I made a video like this, but NBA 2K has a very serious problem. I want to talk about it. I've talked about some of this stuff before, but I've been playing a whole lot of Fortnite. It's going on behind me right now. It's a game that initially I thought like I wasn't really going to be interested in, but it was free. I said I'll try it. Who knows? I'm addicted now. And it's a lot of stuff that Epic Games does right with this game that makes playing 2K like, it's like a whole new world when you hop on Fortnite. So I just want to contrast from a couple of the games that I've played to really outline where 2K is going wrong. And I think it could spell bad things for the future of the company. Obviously when you burn bridges one too many times, you finesse people out their money one too many times, they're going to be cheese, right? No one's going to stick around with the same mind and be like, yo, I'm just going to keep getting the finesse. Who's going to do that? So the first thing is obviously the game itself, the gameplay I like, the program is fun. But where the problem lies is outside of all that, and it's the microtransactions. The fact that you have to spend like an entire week of full-time grinding just to get all your badges and pay $50 just to get your attributes. Unless, unless, of course, you want to start your player without all the core competencies that you would expect a regular basketball player to have. Unless you want to play with a 60 overall, man, you have to spend that money. Let's say you have three players, you spend $50 each on top of the game costs, you're pushing like $220. And that's assuming you don't buy shoes which are super expensive, haircuts, shirts, whatever new content, and assuming you're not even attempting to buy packs on my team. Like, there was a time where 2K said a player came out of the pack, people spent money on the pack, and then 2K is like, no, it ain't come out yet. And people were like, what you mean? Do I get my VC back? Are you playing with me? There was an ad that came out on 2K. It was on the park plastered around a couple of the billboards, and it said, and you probably noticed it if you were playing in the last month, buy $75,000 of VC. No, it's not the... Although they would like that, buy $75,000 VC and get $75,000 free, or was it 50% off? Whatever it was. So a couple people bought it, and they noticed afterwards in the fine print it said, Only available in Australia. 2K. Why would you display an ad even with that kind of fine print to the whole world if it was only applicable to one region? It's small stuff like that that 2K just keeps finessing people about that it's not going to work out. You do it too many times, and apparently 2K made $500 million in 2016. And they said that number has been going up in 2017, so they made even more than that. And Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty, said they were making in the billions on microtransactions. So 2K is not going to stop anytime soon. Is it a trend? We've seen the trend, right? Every year you make less and less VC on MyCure games, on park games, on Pro-Am games, and VC costs more and more. And so just making those differences year over year, it makes it to the point where like, not only do you have to spend VC, because the VC is attached to gameplay. On Fortnite, you can buy skins, but it even reminds you on the bottom it says, Yo, you don't have to buy the skins because it's only cosmetic and it's not associated with the gameplay. It tells you that. They're not trying to scam or trick you into buying anything. They're letting you know like, you could look dope while you play this game that you really enjoy, that we took our time and care in creating and developing. You see where I'm going with this? Probably the next big thing for me was new content. If you play Fortnite, a crossbow drops, then a can cannon, a deagle drops, and then new skins drop, and Season 3 came out or a new map drop. There's so every few days there's something that comes out. And it's such a glorious thing. It's like every day it feels like there's something fresh I could do. I'm addicted to the whole Battle Royale concept, and just being able to build changes everything, I'm addicted. You switch over to 2K on 2K. We got All-Star jerseys, I guess, right? That was new content. On the my team side, they're getting less content than they're used to. There was a period of a month during December where like the my team Twitter didn't even say anything. Like we just assumed they died. Like nobody was saying anything whatsoever. They just decided to go on vacation. I know that House Rules comes on. There's Anti-Up, but it's a rotation of the same events over and over and over again, trying to make it seem like I guess it's new or it's fresh because it's not there all the time. But on Fortnite, not if there's a game that comes out, then it's gone in a week, and then the skin drops, and then it's like, can we up the content game? Now, for 2K, this might not be realistic because while 2K has to worry about creating 2K 19, Fortnite, Rainbow Six, League of Legends, all these games that do a great job of creating new content don't have to worry about a sequel. All they have to worry about is dropping new content for the current game. And I feel like that would be the better route. Now, would 2K ever do that? No. But I feel like the games that I enjoy playing all have a similar kind of development cycle where the game drops and then as time goes on, the user base increases because they're creating a good game and they continue to release good content on Rainbow Six. They have a new outbreak content map. It's like zombies. It's like a horde mode on Gears of War. It's really dope. I mean, it looks dope at least. I still have yet to play it. But is that new content I'm talking about? If 2K wants to be fresh year-long, I mean, for me, Pro-M is gonna do it. I could keep playing Pro-M all year long and I'll be straight. But outside of Pro-M, just to hop on and play the park, there has to be a reason for me. And I think a lot of people need a reason and 2K hasn't been doing a good job of giving people a reason as of late. Probably the most exciting thing for me and it's a rarity in the gaming industry, okay? So when we see it, we have to look at it. We have to appreciate it and we have to say thank you and show support. It's when the community loves the game and the devs love the community. It's a beautiful cycle. Like if you scroll through the website of Fortnite, they literally every week, there's a new detailed patch explaining, we've done this differently, this differently. We changed this and let us know what you think about this and we improved this. We're so sorry this happened. On 2K, there's patches where like we get one sentence sometimes. Sometimes nothing at all. Or sometimes and literally almost all the time, actually there's omissions so they take stuff out that's been changed and we have to find out for ourselves what really changed. Like you will hop on and you'll be like, why is my jumper feel different? And it's because the slider move this way or one animation was tweaked and it wasn't in the patch note and they don't communicate that. Even when I was at the 2K event, I told them like, yo, we need to up the communication. Like just tell us what you're doing at the end of the day. They had a lot of time to prepare for 2K18. If you remember late in 2K17, Mike Wang was moving around the slider saying he was testing the sliders for 2K18. But even when the game came out, the game dropped, everybody complained and he got to moving the sliders once again. And so it was like all that stuff that he was practicing and tuning and it just flew out the window once everybody got angry about missing shots. All right, I'm gonna read out a specific patch note that Fortnite dropped and you can immediately tell the difference between how they conduct themselves and how 2K handles everything. So they say, hey, Fortnite players, you probably run into a few issues playing Fortnite this past week. We've since solved those issues. We know this is affecting a lot of you and we're working to resolve this as quickly as we can. We greatly appreciate all of your patience and understanding. As a token of our appreciation, here are some goodies. Find out more here at URL. They actively apologize, admit faults, say where they're wrong and then make it super clear that they're working even harder to make sure nothing like that happens again. There was a glitch like a month ago where there was a building glitch and sometimes you hit an input and it doesn't hit and you keep dying or dropping or whatever the case is because of one small little glitch. They issue an apology, boom, and within a week they work to fix it with a patch. On top of all the new content that's dropping, it's so crazy to me and this is really where it gets put into context for me that Fortnite is gonna come out with private matchmaking before 2K comes out with private matchmaking for the pro end. I need y'all to know how crazy that is. The money 2K has been making, right? Since this franchise has been blowing up since PS4 started. You know, it's been doing great before that but it's on a new tier with microtransactions. They're making more revenue than ever. You would think with all the new resources they would be solving a lot of the ongoing issues. One of the things we assumed they would solve was there was gonna be a private matchmaking on Pro-M so if I wanna play my buddy who has his five, we can just match up. Not only can we not do that but 2K is going out of their way to make it harder for us to match make by queuing up at the same time and readying up. So one, two, three, ready up! And we just hope we hit each other. We're on a call. No, that's not us. And we have to back out. We go through that process sometimes for over an hour just to match up with one team because 2K doesn't wanna come out with a game mode. That Fortnite, a free to play game is gonna beat 2K too. Like if the microtransactions aren't already enough it's frustrating that there's ongoing issues that aren't being solved. Whether the solve is being fixed for 2K 19 or not, I don't know and I don't care. I just wanna play a better product at the end of the day and we all do. It's a real shame. A lot of these issues aren't new. They've been going on. There's no fix for them. There hasn't been one in sight and without any communication we never know what's being changed if anything is gonna be added in the next week. Whatever the case. We literally just sit there and play the same monotonous thing over and over and over again. Literally if it wasn't for Pro-M I definitely wouldn't be on the park. I might have hopped on my team just to check it out but you wouldn't catch me buying packs on my team. First of all, let's be super clear. Opening up packs is a form of gambling. I'm not, I don't gamble to begin with. You will never catch. I might play a free poker game on a Facebook app that's about it for me. It's just not worth it when you know statistically unless you have some sort of algorithm behind you you're gonna be losing money. So I sympathize with the my team guys who've been just draining their pockets to get some of these top guys. And with the lack of new content on my team outside of the occasional moments card or when there's a special occasion they'll come out with a new special pack. Every single new piece of content that 2K comes out with is just another way for them to make money. There's nothing that really comes out that's new and fresh that they don't benefit from. Like they don't drop a new shirt and then everybody gets a shirt, right? They make you pay for it using VC so you can spend more. You see how I'm going with this? So even when they drop new content they're still benefiting and they're not necessarily doing it because they want to create a great game. And the sad part is is actually when I was at the event it was super clear to me that the devs care. Any dev cares, right? You spent your whole life creating a game this is what you do, your full-time job. You're gonna make sure it's the best possible game it can be. I definitely don't think they're trying to short change us on that. I just think that a lot of the decisions being made are being made based on how much revenue you can make. And if it can't make revenue then it doesn't make sense. And I think that's a horrible model. There's games like Fortnite is just taking over. Like you can't look somewhere without seeing the game. And at first I thought it was obnoxious. I figured I'll just try it. And I realized like I really understand why people love this game. It's because unlike almost in a polar opposite what 2K is doing, they're showing they care. They're coming out with so much free content it's difficult to get bored with. And not only is the battle royale a fresh idea. I mean it kind of started as a mod on Arma 2, right? And they came out with DayZ, H1Z1, PUBG. Like it's been going on ever since. It's a new genre. But it's just a fun way to kick back with your friends, man. And it's super clear. It's super, super clear that Epic Games hit a goddamn whole run with this one. And I'm buying my battle pass. I bought it a few days ago. I'm gonna start buying a whole bunch of new different skins just to support. Because when I see a game that's just doing such a good job I just, I don't know how you can't support it. I wanna make it clear. And I think everybody should have this goal that you support games that deserve being supported. So Rainbow Six, I buy it. I literally buy the operators even though I prefer working towards getting them. Just because I really appreciate what Ubisoft is doing even though there is an occasional glitch and Ubisoft messes up and the community goes crazy. Overall Rainbow Six is a great game. Anyway, that's just where I'm at. I'm hopping on Pro-Am more right now. The combine is finished. I'm kind of getting my team together. It seems like a lot of people went missing in action waiting for the 2K League to see what happens. But I'm gonna be hopping on Pro-Am and making more videos of that so don't trip. Also, I've been streaming almost every single day and uploading videos to Facebook. So if you guys wanna see Fortnite slash 2K type content I'm gonna leave a link in the description and you guys can watch more of me over there. And that's where I'm at y'all. If you enjoy Drop of Life, subscribe if you guys are new. I haven't done like a chill sit down rant video in forever. And I feel like this was definitely deserving of one. Every time I play Fortnite I can't help but appreciate it just because of everything 2K has put me through. Yeah, I'm gonna end there. I'm out. Peace.