 I fully expect the new NBA Street type title over the next couple of years, whether Take-Two or EA ends up developing it. There's been some new developments, man. It makes me super excited because the genre I grew up on has a very good possibility of coming back, and it makes me happy. This video was sponsored by SeatGeek. SeatGeek is an app that helps make buying tickets easier and more affordable. You hop on the website. What game you want to watch? Of course, the Raptors game because you guys are all fans. I'm off-let typing. You choose the event you want to show up to. How about the final game of the season for the Miami Heat? It's dope because it tells you which seats are a great price and which seats are a bad deal. The red, of course, means bad deal and the green means a good price. It even sorts it in that order. It has every event imaginable, not just sports. I mean, you can go to sporting events, music events, more comedy. I don't know what y'all, but I love to watch stand-up. It even predicts for you when they think the price for an event is going to drop so you can wait a little bit. I'm just helping y'all out. Yo, link is in the description. Use code agent, man. $20 off. I'mma leave it there. You're welcome. All right, so take this in. NBA Street seems like it could be back. Our kid basketball has been dead since like the mid-2000s. When I mean dead, I mean like some people have dropped games. Of course, NBA, a new NBA Jam dropped in like mid-2010s. And it did I, but it's super clear that the genre as a whole wasn't as lit as it used to be. So, NBA Jam dropped 1993 games fire. The game sold 3.4 million copies. The Cross's platforms is definitely classified as a classic, super fun game. You just hop in with your friends, all kinds of alley-oops and exciting plays being made. So, the 90s, then you're pushing early 2000s. NBA Street v1 drops. Boom, game blows up. 3.2 million sales. EA is just rolling in money. They dropped v2, v3, home court, and they just had a whole suite of games coming out. v2, in my opinion, one of the if not the greatest basketball game of all time. And then NBA Live 05 dropped. That's when sim games started to take over. You're pushing 06, 7, 8, and NBA Live was just pushing. It was at that point that the street genre had slowly started to fade. While the street genre was making less money, it seemed like NBA Live and even NBA 2K on the come-up was making more and more. So, it wasn't until NBA 2K 10 with the introduction of my career that 2K really took the throne. I mean, you could argue 09 or 08 they did. But it was around that time a lot of people were having the NBA Live versus NBA 2K arguments and yo, I was losing friends over it. There was neighbors and guys at my school that, yo, trust me, I was not giving up. It was an argument to the death. And I was on the NBA Live side of it until 2K 10 dropped and my friend let me borrow it. So, 2K took over, NBA Live 11 didn't drop, 12 didn't drop. They renamed it NBA Elite 13. That garbage-ass game didn't drop neither. And then they came back with 14 and that game was horrible. One of the worst basketball games ever released. And slowly it seems like NBA Live is making a comeback each year being better than the last. Alright, so that's where we are right now. NBA 2K is dominating the scene. They sold over 5 million copies this year. And NBA Live 18, well, they sold under 400,000. So, it's clear. Live 18, 16, no, 17 drop. 15 and 14 all sold horribly. Still though, EA is pushing forward with those games. Now pause. Early last year in 2017, a game called NBA Playgrounds came out. Now, this is a genre again, previously that slowly faded away. And here we go, a dev team we don't even know of comes out with the game and the game sold. First few months of launch, game sold 500,000 copies. Oh, it was like, yo, this game is solid. They got licenses for NBA players. So, they had like dope players in there. They had legends in there. They had me in there along with a couple other YouTubers. We got iPod, okay. Mav, all right. Hey! And they just did a phenomenal job marketing the product and creating a game on what I think is a tight budget. They didn't have the resources Take 2 or EA had. And they still made a game in that genre that sold really well. I heard in September of 2017 from a source that the game sold 600,000 copies, which means it sold more than NBA Live. So, I wouldn't be surprised if right now the number isn't at 7 if not 800,000. Okay, so that's where we're at. NBA Playgrounds has officially proved that there is money to be made in this market. So, you know for a fact, 2K and EA are just watching drinking their Evian water to see if there's any opportunities for them to take advantage of. And I think there is, but only for EA. Okay, so NBA 2K probably would never do it because NBA 2K is doing so well. It doesn't make sense to potentially cannibalize on their own sales with another basketball game. I think it's too risky, it's too risky of a decision. But NBA Live, where is the risk? What do you have to lose? You're making less than 10% of what NBA 2K is making. Actually way less than that because 2K has microtransactions and on top of that, the game sells for full price. Like for example, NBA 2K 16 on Steam still sells for full price even though the servers are down and so you can't access more than half the game. So I take that back, the number might be like 100 times. But I don't know, I'm not in the books. Here's what I do know, NBA Live is about 3 or 4 years back from 2K. Alright, let's be honest. Of course, in terms of gameplay, like, it just sums off about it. It just sums off about it and I don't know what it is, but something is off about it and they can't fix it. The thing is, is the devs know. It's not like they don't know that there's something off about their gameplay. It's that they do know and it's just very challenging to fix. And it's not just the gameplay because that's just the most important part, but not the only part. So it could be the dribbling animations not nearly as much as 2K. It's like, my big man has like one other dribble package he could use, but agent, he's just a big man. So what? I have plenty of dribble packages I could use on NBA 2K, let alone jump shots. There might be a total of like 20 jump shots in the entire game, it's ridiculous. There's no jump shot creator, which is like, that's what I live and die for. There's no wide open park where you can walk around, let alone a neighborhood, which I think is unnecessary, but the park part is important. Don't even get me started on the program that they could improve on. Like, do you want me to keep going? The graphics, the shading looks weird, the textures, the way the jerseys jump around. There's a lot about the game that just isn't right in the note. I could keep going too. I'll just stop here. I feel like the only thing NBA Live does take over 2K is the soundtrack and presentation. Like, if you're frustrated by NBA 2K's unskippable cutscenes, you will absolutely lose your mind over NBA Live's very unnecessary cutscenes. It's not even a real cutscene. It's literally just listening to Stephen A. Smith talk for like five minutes and you cannot skip it. There's a reason I don't watch the show, man, is I have no interest in it, but now I have to listen to him. Anyway, besides the point, it's not NBA Live, right? I'm really just trying to say like, although I wish NBA Live would just come back and be a fantastic game, assuming 2K doesn't even make progress, they're three, four years and knock my bottle down. Assuming NBA 2K doesn't make progress, they're about three, four years away. And assuming 2K doesn't make progress, the chase might be endless. Okay, let me put things into perspective right now. NBA 2K has been through so many controversies off microtransactions alone. There's players being deleted at the beginning of games. There's a lack of new content. Really, all you have to do is look at NBA 2K's Twitter and their replies to all their tweets to know there's a lot of unhappy people. Okay, considering all those people are unhappy, the fact that NBA Live cannot take more market share off 2K is ludicrous. You're telling me NBA Live can't sell over a million copies? Even when? Even when people are really unhappy with their biggest competition. What does that say about their product? You know, I'm hoping it could eventually come back and it'll be great and it'll become... That's what we all hope for. It's great to have competition. But, how about this? I have a better idea. How about if EA just says like, yo, here's this opportunity. We can make an arcade NBA Street type game. We'll bring it back. I mean, NBA Playground sold more than us anyway. Might as well give it a shot. But this time, we're EA, we have more funding, support, and of course, a history in this specific field. So they know specific areas to avoid and specific areas to go into. Do you see where I'm going with this? It sounds crazy because for the longest time, we've been saying bring it back, bring it back, bring it back. And there's never been a response. They've never said maybe one time if this happens. But if NBA Live continues over the next couple of years to perform poorly, even despite of NBA 2K's mishaps, if they can't find a way to get market share, EA is not going to continue to just pummel money into the game that's clearly not working. And I've met the dev team on NBA Live before. They seem like really nice guys. They're motivated. They're passionate. They understand culture. And I think those are very important things that it will require to make a street game. And it's like, it would take them realizing that going sim and going NBA Live is no longer worth it. And who knows, maybe there's people that love NBA Live and they're like, well, but I would never take NBA Live. But how about my NBA Live games? But in my mind, I'm thinking to myself like 2K dominated sim. Like, you're basically trying to climb Everest crawling. But why compete with 2K when they already have sim? There's a whole market of other type of basketball games that other smaller dev teams will already take advantage of and you're not going for it. Hey, that's all I'm saying, man. I just want my NBA Street games back. I'm smiling inside right now. I'm just thinking about the possibility. I don't think NBA Street games are going to be as big as they were in the 90s or even in the early 2000s with V1 and V2. But I think that the era we are in right now has a lot to offer these games. Back when NBA Street was hot, multiplayer just began. Since those games were hot, there's been so much going on in gaming. You can't, I can't even begin to start telling you the types of potential a game like that can have. I'm right now envisioning an NBA Street version of my park and it's, it's, it's, wow, amazing. In my mind, it's, it looks, woohoo, woohoo. Yo, yo, yo. Hey, I'm not the one that gets paid to sit here and think of ideas, man, but I know this is based off what's going on right now in the market that it wouldn't be a long shot. Not even just a long shot. I actually think it's a real possibility. It might just take a couple years for EA to realize it. If it's not EA, it's going to be somebody else, man. An Armored 2 mod comes out and it's a battle royale type game. First time it got really popular. Everybody is hawking and watching the game. An Armored 2 mod blows up. H1Z1 came out. They're trying to take advantage because they realize a lot of people like this genre. H1Z1's blowing up. PUBG pops out of nowhere. That game blows up, destroys H1Z1. PUBG is doing fantastic. Epic Games, like, yo, we want some of the action. A lot of people like these types of games. Epic Games comes out with Fortnite. Fortnite blows up and it's definitely eliminated H1Z1, but it's slowly picking away at PUBG as well. I'm just saying anywhere where there's interest, where people prove that there's money to be made, people are going to dive in, whether it's EA or take two, bro, I hope something happens soon. It will be cool, bro. I think everybody right now is, like, asking what it is. And while previously it just seemed like, yo, just bring it back, EA. It's not that complicated. Right now, they have a real reason to bring it back. Yo, on our podcast, we're actually running a bracket challenge. And I know a lot of y'all like to think that you know more than you think you know about basketball. And we go in about that stuff on our podcast. I'll leave a link to the podcast in the description. Also, to the bracket challenge. Whoever gets first place of all the people who enter is getting a free jersey of your choice. Of course, it's gonna be me. So chances are, you will not be getting a free jersey. But I figured if you want to join in, you can. Yeah, I guess that's all there is to it, man. If you guys enjoyed, make sure to drop a like, subscribe if you guys are new. Hey, let's dream, okay? Because this feels like it's a chance now. And that makes me really excited. I'm out. Peace.