 These microtransactions, you got to buy this, buy that, buy this, to buy that, to buy this, to buy this, to buy this, to put a ponytail on your guy. If you are not Drake, or if you're not an NBA player, if you're not Quavo, they are not listening to you. This is driving me nuts! He's not beating me! It's the connection! Where's the talent in the industry that wants to make a sick-ass basketball game that's competitive? NBA 2K is one of the largest genres on YouTube. What first began as a Chris Move Microware video quickly evolved into a community of thriving content creators. So let's talk about why everyone's leaving, and what 2K could do to help solve it. Three months ago, everybody was ecstatic! All we could talk about is next-gen possibilities, NBA 2K 21 next-gen. Now everyone's disappointed, and we remember the jump from PS3 to PS4, NBA 2K 13 to NBA 2K 14. Everybody was expecting massive improvements both graphically and in terms of gameplay. So what went wrong? Why is everybody unhappy with the game, and why have people stopped playing? I feel like there's a lot of reasons people have lost interest in 2K, but it begins with expectations. It seems like every single time they come out with some grand feature the way they did in 2K 18 with the neighborhood, and 2K 21 with the city, something goes drastically wrong. And in this case, 2K just failed to deliver. So let's talk about what 2K promised and what they didn't deliver. What they promised was a transformative gaming experience, a city, a grand city. You could interact with AI, and they'd give you challenges. You could play with your friends on the garage, and there's a new Rentsakor feature. There's going to be flooded with people, and you could play wherever you wanted. In reality, none of that was the case. You couldn't play wherever you wanted, because only 100 people could enter the city. There were server issues out the ask. You were playing on two frames per second, and all of the challenges that AI gave you were remedial tasks that nobody enjoyed playing. That on top of the plenty of glitches that would keep you from joining games and getting into the same city as your friends. The overall experience was hindered by lack of a better word and competence. And NBA 2K delivered what they always do at launch a bad product. Again, it's about expectations. When NBA 2K 21 current gen came out, everyone's expectations were low. So when the game dropped, regardless of how bad it was, people played, and people were fine with it. It only lasted two months. So when next gen came out, with everybody's expectations sky high and 2K failing to deliver the entire first month being unplayable. Yeah, people were unhappy, and they left. So I was a little curious to find out why both 2K players and content creators were actually going back to current gen and having fun. I think content creators are playing current gen instead of next gen because in my opinion, current gen is a good game. The gameplay feels better. It's not sluggish. It's faster. The dribbling is way better than this on next gen. Plus, more people have current gen. The audience can relate way more to current gen instead of next gen. I personally think that the content is there, but it's not completely there. Everything they did, I feel like with good intent, but just not good execution. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, they need to hire more developers. That goes without saying. And there's no point of doubling, chibbling down on that because 2K is not doing it. They make billions of dollars off this game every single year. But yet the game still is understaffed. The game still releases underprepared and they spend the first few months of every game's launch trying to fix it. But more than that, they need to make the actual experience of getting better at the game and being rewarded for it infinitely more enjoyable. As of right now, you throw lobs and flashy passes and fade at every imaginable opportunity and that's how you win games. That's not a good gaming experience. I have fun when I play next gen for occasion. Anytime I just want to get on a video, that's fun. I do not have fun trying to grind for a level and try to get rewards because the rewards are the same and there's no actual initiative to play for a long term. And that's what video games are about. I think the biggest problem with 2K21 is that they need to make things less inconvenient. The way that the gameplay is, the way that the whole shape of like the park or a neighborhood, whatever they call it, all that stuff is just massively inconvenient. It can make it way more easy and simpler. They need to go back to basics and then kind of restructure from there. But I do believe a lot of the things that are in the game are just way too convoluted. What do you think went wrong with next gen? What do you think went right? Oh, you don't want to say anything? Do you have a question to my question? I did exactly that. Okay. No, seriously, what went right? I don't know. Exactly. Not much. First things first, 2K, you need a skills gap in your basketball game. It goes without saying and the fact that NBA 2K21 next gen is the least skilled version of the game that we've experienced in almost a decade is pathetic. When the game is easy to play, I actually feel like there's no reward to being good at it. And so when there's no reward to being good at the game, why would you play the game? Everyone begins to cheese and just run the same sets. Everyone has the same players. Everyone got the same three builds. And everyone has the same exact play style. That's not fun. And it goes without saying there needs to be better rewards, 2K. I grind my ass off. I make it to legend. And that's all I get. People should be excited about grinding to a level because all the new rewards and perks they're going to get. But instead, on 2K, a lot of the rewards are recycled from previous years. And the stuff they added new to NBA 2K21 next gen, well, they're dry. They need to do a better job of making the experience of leveling up and being rewarded for it fun, enticing, and enjoyable. That just takes more people. Higher, more devs, 2K. You know, you've never actually gone to legend, right? Like, ever? I've never gotten laid. I played on a legend account, though. I was under Roman. I think a lot of content creators get tired of, like, the repetiveness and they get tired of, like, not expecting anything new or different. Like, if this is the same thing over and over and over again, I think it just sucks the creative nature out of creating content. And if that ends up happening, you just find yourself in a rut and you realize, like, this is it for the entire year, the entire life span. The reality is, is 2K never launches ready. So let's look into the past and see what we could do in the future. Every single year, when the game launches, there's something catastrophically wrong. We all rush to try and address it. The devs get to it at some point in the first few weeks of the game's launch and the game becomes playable again. How do we skip over that whole part so that the game just launches ready every single year? One way to do it is just to have 2K working with multiple dev teams. So one year, while someone's working on NBA 2K21 next gen, there's a whole other team working on NBA 2K22 next gen. That way, the games come out more polished, but again, you need to hire more people for that to happen. When there's a yearly launch title and every single year they're being asked to come up with new content, do enough to make the game interesting and that's across all the game modes, the city, my team, Play Now Online, my NBA, that becomes almost impossible and that seems like the most reasonable method that a lot of other dev teams have used to launch yearly titles but come up with new good content and good products ready and prepared every single year. The wars are terrible, the dribbling sucks. I don't, everything is, like why, why doesn't it even play that game? How do you feel about the lack of updates on 2K21 next gen? I'm not gonna lie, I haven't played the game in like a month and a half, so I wouldn't know. Tough. I think the views are down because of the same reason why content creators don't like to create a content. It's just, it's not creative. It's nothing new. There's no innovation there. There's nothing that's bringing me to the game that I haven't already seen in the past two or three years. It's essentially the same thing. It looks very similar, you know, the last two or three cycles. And to add on to that, 2K, you have to, and I mean absolutely have to, come with game testers that are actually good at the game. When these game testers are awful at the game, it's gonna reflect in the game. It's gonna come out broken, get people to break your game before the game comes out, and it's gonna come out a lot more polished, ladies and gentlemen. The devs mentioning physical updates and changes is absolutely ridiculous because the game feels more stiff than it ever has. I don't understand how 2K, 14, 15 and 16 can feel so much more fluid, can feel like a real actual player. And then the next generation game when they added physics and added all this more movement, you feel like, it feels like I'm literally playing Roblox when I play that game. That is f***ing disgusting. Oh my god, compare the difference to mine. And I haven't gotten my toes done in like four weeks. I think content creators are not posting this game anymore because content creators are not playing the game anymore. Once again, even though they're adding the city, the new stage, the new core, the new vibes to the game, there's no reason to play long term. Aesthetics can entertain me for the time being for one, two, maybe ten games, but I actually need to have a reason to play it. So I think content creators are not posting because they're not playing. How do you feel about the level design in the city? I think it's pretty good, but it doesn't matter because the game is terrible. All that works for nothing, right? It's clear to me that the NBA 2K developers know what they're doing. If they didn't, the game will look a lot like NBA Live, but because it doesn't, and NBA 2K has dropped good basketball products multiple times in the last decade, I'm confident they could do it again. And with the next generation jumping, all the new ceilings that they can do and all the new development tools at their disposal, we expected a lot. If you had one message for Ronnie, what would it be? Suck my... No, I'm just playing. Cut it out, cut it out. Don't be defensive. Don't be so defensive. I think that's probably the biggest thing with Ronnie. I get it. He gets a lot of flag from different directions. And I do believe as a community, we should understand like, that man ain't got nothing to do with the actual creation of the video game itself. I definitely feel like from a community standpoint, we should really take responsibility on how we communicate with Ronnie. But I do believe there's a lot of other ways where he's just being mad defensive. He's putting on this front, as if he's someone that we all know he's not, and it just makes it much more difficult for the community to communicate with the person who's supposed to be representing the community. And from there, I do believe there's a disconnect between the two entities. So that's all this really was, is just expectations being let down. NBA 2K. For current gen, nobody expected anything from you guys. And so people were happy with mediocre, or below mediocre, should I say. But with next gen, everyone expected greatness. And so when we got mediocre, that's where the disappointment happened. And you can see it in the faces of the people that play the game every single day. And the content creators that weren't excited to hop on and play and record and upload themselves playing the game every day. And these are people that have been doing this for almost a decade giving up now. So you have to ask yourself the question, what it is about what you did with NBA 2K 21 next gen that turned a lot of people off. And the answer is pretty clear. So close. You thought I was going there, right? Yeah. There are two big things that 2K can do to change their problems in their games. The first thing is make the game free. If you stop coming out with annual releases, which is the second thing, you will have much more time to focus on said project. If 2K came out with one set game, and they did season passes for every new season with updated material, updated maps, parks, cities, gear, all of that. Within a four to six year span, they would do so much better with their product. They would stop coming out with annual releases, make the game free. Microtransactions are a thing. As long as they're cosmetic, you're good to go. That will solve all the problems. So you might be thinking to yourself, is the solution just to play on last gen? On the current gen version of NBA 2K 21. Answers are clear, no. Everybody got their strike packs and moderate controllers. You can hop on there, but the experience is going to be riddled with hackers and people trying to ruin the experience. So if next gen is our only option, what could the devs do to solve it? I think the biggest issue they made was having the city be one massive server if they're going to be affiliations, they should have had separate servers and load mass people into those separate servers and go to a door or something and again to the next lobby for the next affiliation. But more than all of that, the entire gaming experience should be optimized for fun. I've been asking for a proximity chat for years now and I've never gotten a good reason as to why it's not added in NBA 2K. You're in a city amongst people and you can't talk to them unless you're in a party with them. That makes no sense to me. So simple features like that that I know would make a magnificent difference and just a fun factor of the game are not added. And that spans across the entirety of the game. A lot of opportunities are missed and I don't know why. This is not the worst 2K of all time. This is one of the best 2Ks when it comes to brand new content they're adding to the game. In terms of replay value, this is one of the worst 2Ks. But in terms of content, it's one of the better 2Ks. It's kind of hard to balance, but it's up there when it comes to content in terms of like new things they added, but there's no reason to actually play, so that's what a game's about. 2K, your game is not fun right now. You need to add some fun into your game and that's a difficult thing to do. I get it. The community saying one thing here and the next thing there really no one's ever happy with the current version of the game. People only reflect years past and say, man, I really enjoyed NBA 2K19. But me personally, I'm a guy that works beyond franchise fatigue and recency bias. When 2K19 was out, I said it was one of the best 2Ks all time. I believe that. And that was amongst everybody telling me how bad of a game it was because of this, this, and this. I could see through that. Let's be honest with each other, man. At the end of the day, I'm just not having too much fun making the 2K-related stuff. There's no coincidence that your favorite 2K creators also have second and third channels now because the trajectory of 2K is going like this. We're a couple months into the 2K21 cycle and people just don't care anymore. People aren't playing at the parks. People aren't playing wrecking things like that. They're not going to play because people aren't playing wrecking things like that. It's just not fun. NBA 2K21 Next Gen objectively is a not-fun game. I know that now and I know that'll be the case in 10 years when we look back at this day. But please, you need to do something to make the game-playing experience enjoyable, rewarding, and most importantly, fun for everyone. I actually think it's unsayable by this way. I think there's too much irreversible damage. Nothing. Yeah, nothing. Because they're not going to add dribbles. They're not going to change like nothing. And don't get me started on 2K22. I feel about 2K22. 2K, you've been giving many suggestions on how to make this game a better experience to play. And it feels like the grand ideas you just have to wait till next year. And the small ideas are still not being implemented. And on top of that, the communication is non-existent, 2K. We don't know when the next update is going to happen. It's been over a month and there's just some glaring issues with the game that have yet to be acknowledged, that have yet to be addressed. And so you have options. You hear the community feedback. And I know the community managers and all those guys, they really have feedback to developers. And so it's on the developers to let us know what's going on with the game. Because as of right now, people aren't having fun playing. Y'all new to the channel, man? Be sure to subscribe as investigative agent analysis in the building. And I'll catch you guys in the next one. Bye. Let me get off this fucking thing before I fall off. Let me get off this thing.