 Alright man, it's no secret that 2K's main priority is to make money. Listen, if they found out tomorrow that they can't make any more money making NBA 2K games, boom, they're out of the business, it's over. And we know that's the reality, and we face it every single day, and we know 2K has crazy microtransactions. You read the articles, you've been through it because you played the game. Get my f***ing keyboard. Yo, but an interesting article came out a couple weeks ago, and it kinda brought me on this adventure where I just did way more investigating than I needed to, and I discovered some f***ing, and I came to a realization that I hope you'll f***ing... Am I audio level straight? Oh, there I am, okay, okay. So let me just take you on the journey. Okay, so this article dropped by Kotaku, f***ing hell, right? I know, Kotaku did some good journalism for once, hallelujah. Alright, Take 2 Boss gets big bonuses if the company sells enough microtransactions in DLC. It's already bad enough, right? We have to deal with it. The microtransactions is OD, I've talked about it for a couple years now, and it's gotten to the point, you wonder where the rant videos went. I came to a realization, there's no single video I can make, or anybody can make, that's ever gonna change anything 2K will do. They're gonna operate the exact same way because they continue to make a ton of money, and we know that. But as you scroll down into the article and you dive deeper, it's scary how much money's being made by ruining good products. So I'm gonna give a simplified version of this so it makes sense for everybody. NBA 2K is owned by Take 2. Take 2 is the publisher. Take 2 also owns a bunch of different developers like Rockstar that makes GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption. We know that. But what you probably didn't know is that a company called Zelnik Media actually owns Take 2. Not just Take 2, but a whole slew of other media companies. This company's Zelnik Media is worth billions of dollars, and you might have guessed it because you could probably recognize the name. That's also the Take 2 CEO. So he owns the company and a slew of others, but he's also the CEO for the company. So not only does he benefit from all the microtransactions they spam in our favorite games, but he's the one that's doing it too. It's no secret. If you type in NBA 2K microtransactions on Google, there's article after article after article criticizing 2K. And it's probably what it's known for the most, right? If you talk to a guy that doesn't know or doesn't play 2K whatsoever, what they're gonna tell you about the game is, I don't really play 2K, but I know that the microtransactions are crazy. But the thing is, is they have no idea how bad it is. Because when you see the uproar games like Star Wars got, if they even knew what 2K and EA were up to in their sports titles, they would go in bonkers. What I'm trying to say is that we know the frustration is there. But every year 2K18 comes out gloating, saying things like, 2K18 is our highest selling sports title and a testament to the tireless hard work and innovation of the team over at Visual Concepts. If you don't know, Visual Concepts is the actual development team. So Visual Concepts develops the game, NBA 2K publishes the game, NBA 2K is owned by Take 2, and Take 2 is managed by Zelnik Media. 2K announced today that NBA 2K18 has sold now more than 10 million units. And that was a garbage-ass 2K. In 19, they did even better. And it's each year that are one-upping each other and finding ways to make even more money. From a business sense, it's incredibly impressive. If you're a shareholder in this company, look, check out the stock, all right? If you bought into Take 2 here at 28 USD and you just held for a few years, my guys, you done quadrupled your money easy, boom. And you know what's funny is for a video in 2017, I was actually gonna buy $10,000 worth of Take 2 stock as a joke, just for fun. Just to see where it went, fuck it, manless. Hey, life is worth living. And if I did that, I would've more than doubled my money. I just didn't know anything about stock. I had a whole video planned a couple years ago and I didn't do it and I lost, it's opportunity cost. I just didn't end up making the money. I would've had $20,000, probably more. So you might be wondering, what's this dip here, agent? Is Take 2 not doing so hot? What's happening over here? This has nothing to do with the performance of the organization, all right? This drop right here, the only reason it ever dropped is not because they started making less money or investors were a little worried. It's because the FTC is now looking into loot boxes. The FTC is doing an entire investigation. And if the FTC decides that loot boxes should be vanished from games, what happens to the Microchain? What happens to the My Team Packs? That's a big hit to 2K. And so that's the only reason investors were pulling back and it's a publicly traded company. And so that means that we can see all their numbers because they have to post it every quarter. Just to give you a small dose of what I mean here, I covered this about a year ago, but the Netherlands started enforcing a loot box ban. What that means for 2K is if they wanna drop their game in the Netherlands, then they have to abide by the legislation there. And so they had to make adjustments to game modes like My Team to draw back on all those loot boxes because it was against the law there. So the only reason that stopped is not because they stopped making a ton of money, it's because in the future, investors aren't really sure whether or not it's gonna make a difference, all right, check this out. There's this list here of the top 25 gaming companies. And Tencent Games is one of them. Tencent Games actually owns Take Two. So this goes a step higher. Tencent Games is a giant Chinese gaming company and conglomerate, you wouldn't believe how big they are. It's unbelievable how more people haven't heard of them. But if we ignore everybody else on this list and just look at the gaming publishers, you would have Activision at five, EA at eight and Take Two Interactive at 11. So there's some really, really big numbers. But this is where things get really interesting because if you're an avid fan of 2K, you already knew all of that. Dayquan put out a tweet just a few days ago saying, 99% of these developers only see dollar signs, man. Hopefully one day some will care. But in this situation, Dayquan is blaming the developers for the problem. I mean, there's no shortage of it. I do it, you do it. Everybody on Twitter does it. There's no, every time something goes wrong in 2K, we blame Ronnie2K and Mike Wayne because those are the people who made the game. Check these screenshots here. John Wall sends a tweet to Ronnie2K saying, you a joke, this was a couple of years ago. Ronnie2K responds, lol, 90 is not good enough, bro. John Wall says, lol, what was I last year? You started at an 87 and ended at a 93, I think. Everyone starts lower from the end of the season. You always move it up, bro. Lol, all good, bro. I ended at a 90, a good try with the 93. And then Ronnie2K dropped the little salt gift. Cause like, this is Ronnie and he just does cringy things from time to time. Okay, exhibit number two. Here's Ronnie2K going at it with Ben Simmons. Ronnie2K adds him on Twitter, says, DM'd you at 2K18 screen, bro, with your beard. Host up when you can. Which is like a weird way to tell someone to do something that they're contractually obligated to, hey, I'm gonna tweet it at you publicly so everybody else can see it. That obviously meant that Ben Simmons wasn't messing with Ronnie and he didn't give him his number. But that's besides the point. Ben Simmons responds, do I know you? You can't possibly be that salty about your rating. Ha, ha, ha. I'm all about call of duty. I think it's time to expose the DMs. It's another player that got angry about his rating and then he blamed it at the only person he knew in 2K, Ronnie2K. But even in this situation, that's not the right guy to blame. If you're ever angry about your rating, it's him, Mike Staufer. This is the guy who does all the ratings for 2K and I'll say this, he does a pretty damn accurate job. But if you're an NBA player, of course you might feel offended if you're just seven points lower than you believe you are. But again, they just blame the person they know and not the person who actually deserves it. But this is the reality of the situation in many cases, right? The developers don't stand to gain anything by adding microtransactions. Zelnik does, because he owns the company. Mike Wang doesn't get massive bonuses for adding in a ton of microtransactions, nor does any other developer that we know of. There was this article that dropped a few days ago and it has to do with Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite. And one of the employees was on this polygon article talking about how much he gets worked. I'm gonna read some excerpts from the article and you'll get the sense of what I'm talking about. I work an average of 70 hours a week. An average, not like that's maybe like on one of the weeks in the year he might, no, no, no. He regularly does that, which is crazy, which means the peak must be higher than that. There's probably at least 50 or even 100 other people at Epic's working those hours. I know people who pull 100 hour weeks. A company gives us unlimited time off, but it's almost impossible to take time off. If I take time off, the workload falls on other people and no one wants to be that guy. Yo, Vortex, come here. Aw, you're so beautiful. I don't think they've seen you before, man. This is Vortex. He's the one who says reckless, my videos all the time. All right, Vortex works retail. Vortex, if I told you to take a day off, what's the one day you would never take off? Why do we get it? Busiest time. And so why don't you just take it off on the busiest time? Let's work. Look, that don't wanna be that one guy. But I tell you, you don't wanna be that one guy. So they give you unlimited time off, but you end up working all of it because you wanna be that one guy. And then you go to work the next day and fucking John is telling you how much he hates you because he had to work double that day. Thank you, Vortex. No problem. You didn't do shit. I think your input was invalid. I'm gonna read you a couple more excerpts. It gets deep. I've had friends break down in tears. The executives keep reacting and changing things, said the source. Everything has to be done immediately. We're not allowed to spend time on anything if something breaks a weapon, say. And we can't just turn it off and fix it with the next patch. It has to be fixed immediately. And all the while, we're still working on next week's patch. It's brutal. I hardly sleep. I'm grumpy at home. I have no energy to go out. Getting a weekend away from work is a major achievement. So I'm just trying to illustrate the picture here. And this is not the first time I've heard anything like this. I talked about it. Do you guys remember when I went to that 2K18 event? No, sorry, the 2K19 event in September. I talked to some of the devs and in one of the videos, I forgot which one I even mentioned, Mike Wang told me he worked 70, 80 hour weeks. And at the time, I was talking to some of the other 2K content creators and I was like, yo, he must be boosting because there's no possible way a man works that much, that consistently. That's not healthy. But agent, you're not healthy. Shut the fuck up. It's not the time for that. So the developers are being set these extreme expectations from the executives. But because we don't know the executives, we only know what we know when something is wrong. We blame Ronnie and Mike Wang, even though they don't stand to game a thing, right? In best case scenario, senior developer might make like an extra 15,000, get a nice little promotion. But on what fucking planet does 15,000 even remotely make worth 100 hour work weeks? That means you have no life. You have no time to do anything. If you guys remember back in 2K18 and in the middle of the story that you couldn't skip by the way because it was such a horrible, was that 2K18? Yo, Vortex, was 2K, 2K18 was a story you couldn't skip, right? Yeah. In that garbage ass story mode, you couldn't skip. And at one point Ronnie 2K actually messages you and he says this, nice job on signing a Jordan deal, another step closer to being able to hang out with guys like me. And then your character responds, sure Ronnie, by the way, fix your servers. So even Ronnie's joking about it. And for a long time up until like two weeks ago where we covered in the 2K drama alert, Ronnie 2K's bio actively mentioned servers. He would say the servers aren't me, but hit up 2K support if you have any problem. So then if we know that and we know it's not their fault, if you spend hundreds of hours a week, hold on, that's boosting. Let's say you spend two hours in one day to put together your IKEA desk. You love your desk a little bit more because it was like some effort went into building it. I built my PCs, right? And so they're like my babies. I never let anything happen to my PCs. Imagine spending thousands of hours over the course of a year on something and then you do the best you can with the insane expectations that you have in the limited resources. And then when the game releases, everybody hates it. And they don't blame the person responsible. They blame you. So not only did you work your ass off for some that you tried your best on and you're one of the most talented people on the planet, but then you get home and you have to read tweets about how horrible of a person you are for ruining the game that a fan enjoyed. Now don't get me wrong. There's some times where developers just royally mess up enough because they're not paying attention to the community. And 2K's, we've been through that with 2K time and time again. We've seen it. We've seen it. We've seen it. And in those situations, like when a slider has to change here or this has to change there, then we could easily point to a dev and say, which dev did that? Whichever dev decided to add shoving to the game, I want to speak to him one on one. We got to talk. I just want to talk. Because that has nothing to do with no executive. That's just a bad decision that was being made. But when the servers are horrible, it's kind of like when your internet is messed up and you have to call Comcasts or Rogers and you get mad at the customer service person even though you know it's not them causing the problem, you just don't know what else to be mad at. And so you kind of just let it out and they have to deal with it. It's their job, it's part of their job. I drove that point home, cool. It was this interview I saw and it was absolutely fascinating because we don't know who Zelnik is. I mean, I've seen brief things about him from time to time, an article here, an article there. But in this, he did an interview with Gary Vee and I love Gary Vee, so I watched the entire thing. It was absolutely fascinating to learn about the guy who benefits from ruining all our favorite games. That's what the fuck we're about to dissect real quick. There's a couple points in the video I wanna point you to and then you're gonna be like, what? I have to drop a like and subscribe to this guy cause he's amazing. You might just say something like that hopefully. You're not sure cause you're young how it got into your zeitgeist but you immediately became committed to it. Yeah, I think I had some sense like that it was very glamorous and that you could be like. But at five, you cared about the girls already? I think it was more about the money. I got respect. One or the other, I guess wrong. Zellnick grew up with the dream of wanting to run a movie studio. He said he dreamed he was very glamorous and he was gonna make a lot of money. He graduated from university, he got his masters. He started things off with the summer internship at Viacom and it's in enough. He got his first sales job at Columbia Pictures. He was recruited to one of the first home entertainment companies and in nine months flat became the CEO and then his next position was the CEO of 20th Century Fox. How is that fucking possible? Run, we had a whole bunch of hits. So after being in the movie business for seven years I really sort of revised my goals having that what I thought was a very long-term goal pretty quickly. And I decided to revise my goals. So I really wanna do something that's in entertainment but also highly entrepreneurial. And I sort of surveyed the landscape and I said, this is 1993. I said, you know, I think video games are gonna become a huge entertainment business. So hallelujah, he's in his late 20s already mad successful and he has his sights on video games. You see where this is going? He becomes the CEO of a company called Crystal Dynamics. He turned this company called BMG into a massive record company. He says he took them from last place to first place. So he's just in two, three years flat he's doing something and then becoming the best at it and then getting bored kind of like Casey Neistat with the vlogs and then just doing something else and then being the best at it and then trying something else. I've never seen a success story like this. So then that's when he created Zelnik Media Group and he didn't have any money or assets at the time. So he said he started it with $300,000 of his own money. Now that company is worth billions and it owns Take Two and he had a whole list of other companies I couldn't recognize but I did some Googling. Let's just say his company is worth billions of dollars. But the interesting part is is when his company decided to acquire Take Two. I didn't know this. I've never heard this anywhere except from this interview, but this is what he said. We did, however, buy an online market research company before that was Sexy and obviously took over a video game company in 07 that was very nearly bankrupt. The perception was that company was with no chance of making it that company's market cap today is about $10 billion or more. Hey guys, we know a company that has a market cap of $10 billion. Take Two, I didn't know that when he acquired it, they were near bankruptcy. And so he did it again. He took a company that was at the bottom and then propelled it to the top. And I guarantee you, he's gonna get bored and move on to the next thing. If I didn't love Take Two so much, I'd actually be impressed. So for all intents and purposes, Strauss Zellnick. This is the guy who's rarely ever filled in his life. Every venture has been a success. Not just kind of a success, like a Will Smith success, like the biggest superstar moment at the very tippity top of the game. So he has all these measly peasants like us telling him, hey, hey, the microtransactions, you're gonna ruin your game. This is not the way of the future. Your game is gonna die. Could you fix the servers? Of course he's gonna think he's right. He's never been wrong before. And I hope that that's not the case. And if anything, the fight that people showed to EA when they tried to go OD on Star Wars, restored faith for me, that at least we can fight a little bit back so that we can have a game that we actually enjoy. But that's the guy. When you get really angry at 2K because something is broken, there's a chance a dev just messed up. There's a good chance that might be possible. But there's a better chance that they had the resources to hire five more very competent developers and put them in the studio with Mike Wang and all of the other guys and they just didn't decide to do it. The video game market is ruthless, my guys. Apex Legends came out with a bang, respawn entertainment, very talented group of guys. Those are the guys that originally made, the core group of people that originally made Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2. I love those guys. They made Titanfall and I wasn't really messing with it but I understood what they were trying to do and boom, here comes Apex Legends, huge hit. Apex did a lot to innovate but two of the main things was the insanely good pinging system and the respawns in a battle royale. It took Fortnite three weeks to copy both of those things, put it in their game and now you have hundreds of articles talking about how Apex Legends lost 90% of his viewership in the first two months of its launch. Absolutely ruthless. If you have a good idea, next company's gonna see it and take it. So if you're not on top of your game all the time and working your employees to oblivion and keeping all that extra cash so your company can profit and all the shareholders can be happy, then there's a chance you might not be in business in 10 years. But that's no excuse to drop a product that the fans don't want because there's ample evidence that there's plenty of great development studios that have been successful for a very long time like Naughty Dog and what's the company vein? CD Project Red, those are my guys. How can I not know? So you might be wondering, okay, Agent, we're talking a lot about the Zelny character. How about Tencent Games? Tencent owns, hold on, bro. Let me just show you guys what I'm talking about. So here's a short list of massive games that Tencent owns part of, if not all of. League of Legends, massive. PUBG, massive. Clash Royale is huge in the mobile department. It owns part of Fortnite, big. H1Z1, PUBG Mobile and PUBG. It owns FIFA Online, Rainbow Six Siege. I mean, NBA 2K, Rockstar and all the things owned on their take two. I mean, there's Ring of Valetium, there's Call of Duty. You can scroll through the list by yourself, my guys. It's a Chinese company but it owns games all around the world and it doesn't own all of them but it owns like 5% here, 30% there. So it has a huge sum. And if you look at the list, it is the biggest gaming company on the planet. So you might be wondering, Agent, why isn't that, does that company influence these guys maybe? Maybe that company's the one making decisions. I don't think so because I mean, just based off Pure Logic, right? Let's do this. Epic Games had a fantastic formula. Their game was not pay to win. Very, very good product. They had an insane amount of content. It was fun and innovative and it blew up but Tencent Games owns both NBA 2K and Epic Games. So if they had an influence over the types of microtransactions or practices that they required for companies that they own, then listen, man, all these companies will be in, but there's plenty of companies that Tencent owns that makes really good products. So I don't think it has anything to do with them. They just have like 5%, 10% here, 20%, 30% there. So they don't even have enough to make final decisions like that anyway. Wow, okay, we unpacked a lot. And then you see articles like this, 10 major game studios closed in the past 12 months. And you might recognize some of them like Visceral, that's a pretty big one. I scroll down here, Boss Key Productions, and probably the biggest one you'll easily recognize is Telltale Games. And those are the guys who made that very popular Walking Dead series. The reality is if you can't find a way to monetize your game and fund the projects you're trying to do, you die. So what a lot of these companies end up doing is they have sports titles like NBA 2K or Madden and they just are cash cows, easy money, right? And they don't invest in those games to make them amazing because what makes more sense for them is to use that money to spend on new IPs, to try new things, because you have to try new things or else your company dies. So when you think about it like that, you understand why those decisions are made. And then when you think about it like that, you appreciate the publishers and the developers that truly respect the whole process. You obviously wanna make some money, but you wanna make sure you make a great product more than anything. Those companies are out there and when you find them, you love them because they're rare and you respect that about them. There's just a guy who is incredibly successful and right about almost everything. He apparently saved take two, but in the process ruined a lot of the games that we loved growing up. Game and company is crazy. I was watching Shroud on stream today and he's one of the, if you guys don't know Shroud, he's one of the biggest content creators on the planet. And he said this. It sucks that like games are so risky. Like the video game industry is so massive, but it's still just so risky. That's why our games are such trash. The only people that can make money off of them are the people that just like recycle their games. This guy plays games for 12 hours a day, every single day. Oh, listen, when he says things, I trust what he says. If you see a game that you enjoy, that you wanna see more of, support that. And if there's something that you don't like, then say something about that because that's the only way we start getting the games that we all enjoy. Listen, we all have different needs in the game, right? I'm a multiplayer kind of guy. I see a game like Days Gone. It looks interesting, but it doesn't have no co-op, no multiplayer, so I can't buy it. But hey, if you like that, support it. So PlayStation develops more things like it. I'll tell you guys this before I end the video. A very tragic mistake I made, I loved Socom. Socom is my favorite franchise of all time and is what got me into video games, is what got me into YouTube. But I was very angry when Socom Confrontation came out because a different development studio was developing it. This one was called Slant Six Games and they did up, man, it was a horrible job they did. And the whole community was mad and we would make these rant videos. Well, I would watch them, I didn't make them at the time, but people would make these videos furious, kind of like how we do in the 2K community. Now, because Socom was an exclusive, it was owned by PlayStation. PlayStation decided to come out with the next Socom, Socom 4, and this time they went back to the original developers that made all the Socoms we used to love. So we were kind of excited, but then the beta came out and everybody was just like, wow. They took the game we loved and tried to make it mainstream and ruined it. And there was countless people calling for a protest, don't buy it, we got to speak with our wallets. And that's true, a lot of the times you should. And I thought I was being fucking courageous because it was this game that I loved, but they were ruining it and the only way I could show what to do was to not buy it. In a year, Socom 4 flopped and PlayStation decided to shut down the studio. Activision just did it with Destiny. If you just do a little bit of research on what happened with Bungie and Activision, why in Destiny was so fucked up, you'd understand. It's like a circle. The publisher puts these unreal expectations on the developer. The developer does them and it ruins the game until the fans are mad. The fans get mad at the developers for ruining the game and then fucking publishers also mad at the developer for not doing exactly what it wants. Bungie just said, I'm out. What the fuck do y'all want from me? I'm out. And that's usually a good case scenario because what usually ends up happening is the company just shuts them down. EA, man, let me type this. EA shuts down devs. You there's gonna be a whole fucking list, two pages long with a hundred on each page. Visceral Games joins a long list of closed studios by EA. It's basically a meme on the internet at this point. If you sign to EA or in Activision or take to one of these big companies, eventually you can come across the damn crossroads. You either ruin your game or you're out of business and sometimes both. And that's what happens. And then you join articles like this and now you're on the list of one of the 12 companies that shut down. And then it's like a circle because companies like Take Two will see these articles and go, you see, this is why we have to push harder on the microtransactions because this can't be us. Shroud knows as good as anybody. It's a very volatile community and you gotta get what you can while you can get it. But in the process, the games get ruined. And so if you guys can stop real quick and just focus on making great games. Hey, I don't know, maybe I'm just out of my league. Hey, I just don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. That's very possible. I just don't know what I'm saying anymore. And that's the rabbit hole I went down. Drop a like or subscribe to the channel, one of the two or do both if you're with it, you know what I mean? All right, yeah, I'm gonna head out.