 Oh, yes, it's a victory today. Hey, you see a giant smile on my face because for years on this channel, you've heard me repeat the same thing over and over again, hire more developers. And I gave up, man, I didn't think it was gonna do it. Time and time again, I'd hear from 2K publishing people or dev people that is not that easy. It's like, it's harder in practice, but it's like, that's an excuse. There's so many ways to hire more people. I mean, there's dev teams that unfortunately go under all the time in this ruthless gaming industry. People go bankrupt. There's no shortage of those. Lionhead Studios, Telltale Games, Visceral Games, Zippra Interactive, you name it. Those guys need jobs. But today's news is one that is joyous and one that should put a smile on the face of 2K fans everywhere. Because NBA 2K on Reddit reported interesting news. 2K has expanded the NBA 2K dev team by acquiring Hook Bank Video Games Division. They'll be rebranding as Visual Concept Austin and support development of future games. They followed up, they will recruit hundreds of developers to support NBA 2K. Hook Bank provided art, design, and engineering support for the last few games, including NBA 2K 21. They specialized in newer tech like assistive augmented reality. You mean to tell me this wasn't possible the whole time? Ladies and gentlemen, this is how it goes. NBA 2K is such a huge monumental success every single year. I mean, they were upping their sales numbers and breaking records. Can you imagine if Stephen Curry got like six career highs, six games in a row? That'd be an incredible run. That's what NBA 2K has been doing in terms of sales. But a lot of the times what would happen is they would take that money and they would buy NBA Playgrounds and call it NBA 2K Playgrounds. They would buy a golf entity and call it 2K Golf PGA, whatever. They would take that money and do other things with it to make more money, which is how business works. But when the actual product that's making the money, NBA 2K, is not seeing many of the benefits that it should be, when I'm hearing over and over again how there's no resources or if somebody's trying to tell me that it's too hard to hire more people, I don't believe it. Because the resources exist. This is not a struggling franchise. There's no shortage of devs. I mean, look at this list here. Visceral Games, one of the all-time dev teams, by the way. EA kind of put them in the shitter. Ha ha ha ha ha. Telltale Games, I think they recently came back. Lionhead Studios, I mean, they're zipper interactive, THQ. There's no shortage of great dev teams that unfortunately went under in this very, very ruthless, and I was gonna say NBA, overall gaming industry. You can't just pick those guys up. I mean, Google just closed its own stadium development to in-house studio stadium development teams. Yo, there's talented people all around this industry looking for work. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, hey there. I just interrupted my keynote speech at my business conference at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium to let you know this video is sponsored by Current. Current is the future of banking. It's a mobile bank with a Visa debit card. That's why I always got mine in the tub. Anytime I need it, it's there with me. Current is a real bank account with no hidden fees and no minimum balance and free overdraft for up to $100. Every time I swipe my current card, I earn points. I can take those points and redeem them for cash. Current are the only ones doing that. There's over 55,000 free ATMs for you to choose from all around the country, ladies and gentlemen. This is business mogul agent, letting you know current is the choice. It's my choice, my current choice. I don't know what's wrong with me, guys. And I'll be honest, it works with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App and Venmo, so it's convenient, ladies and gentlemen. You wanna be a business mogul like me? Get on top of your game, fellas. Top link in the description or go to current.com slash agent 00. Sign up. It takes nothing about two minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Pause this video right now and sign up. This is business mogul agent. I got a conference to get back to. I'll catch you guys later. And then the most frustrating part about all it is is after sitting here in 2K, not hiring more developers for so many years, you would hear stories like this one titled Scott O'Gallagher leaving NBA 2K series for creative director role at EA Sports. And then you start kicking your feet. One of 2K's top gameplay guys leave. And if y'all remember, the last time a top gameplay director had Hancho left was in 2K9 when Mike Wang left to go to EA. And then the second Mike Wang returned, guys, they dropped NBA 2K 10 and 11. So to see them not actively hiring a lot more people to make this potentially fantastic series, the success it can be, and then watching some of their best people get poached was just like, man, what are we doing right now? So let me provide you a little bit of context because there have been changes made in the gaming industry and working from home is gonna make things more challenging when it comes to developing basketball games. Honestly, it's been on my mind that NBA 2K could potentially be delayed just based off of that merit. So EA recently took criteria on, which was most popularly known for making the Need for Speed series lit again. For lack of a better word. I sound like that one GameStop guy that said this. The way he leaps off of rooftops and flips backwards to face the camera before falling into a headfirst dive is just full of the exaggerated swagger of a black teen. So DICE, one of the best dev teams on planet Earth has had the luxury of working on the Battlefield series for a very long time. There's a new Battlefield game coming out this fall and they actually noted that there's been some challenges working from home for that dev team. The solution was to bring on criteria and delay Need for Speed for another year to make sure that this Battlefield game can be all that it can. Criterion is no small dev team. They absolutely killed it with Need for Speed and then EA decided to give Need for Speed to another dev team that put it in the shitter for a few games straight. So any person that plays and loves Battlefield should be ecstatic that a very reputable dev team is helping an already really reputable dev team in creating a lit Battlefield experience. It's making me wanna buy Battlefield and I skipped the last couple games. EA had this to say, Battlefield is shaping up great. The team has been working incredibly hard. They pushed hard last year and yes, we have been working from home. And it's hard. It's hard to make games from home and the EA DICE team is fatigued a bit. He went on to talk about how he wants the game to be as good as it possibly can before it jobs regular things. But that's the side of the industry that we don't get to hear much about. And so I imagine considering 2K dropped the current gen and next gen version of the game between November and whenever the next NBA season starts when they plan on launching the next 2K that doesn't give him much time and even cutting back one to two weeks on when they usually expect to drop the game is a massive change. So to do it by one or two months is even more. I just wasn't incredibly optimistic that the game was gonna release when we usually expect NBA 2K to release. And so that being said, I was a little bit nervous that there were gonna be delays. I don't know the exact reasoning as to why 2K decided to hire more developers but I think we should pay attention to what was said. Hook Bang has partnered with us on NBA 2K for the past couple of years and we're pleased to welcome its talented team to the Visual Concepts family. So this is not like their first time working with the game they've provided some level of support for the past few 2Ks. This is not nothing incredibly new. I'm just assuming now that there's gonna be a higher level of support especially when you read things like this. The studio will operate from a to be announced new location in Austin, Texas metropolitan area and plans to employ hundreds of developers to support as well as the company's expanding publishing business. So they're not all gonna be developers. I guess some of them are gonna be on the publishing side of things. Hundreds of developers out of got my dick hard. 100% of the chance, man. I don't even have to doubt it, guys. But there's a reason I've been saying this for years. It makes sense. Right now across this channel, you're watching this on my second channel. I'm trying to upload every other day. A&P that uploads every week. Playback uploads every other day. And the podcast that drops two times a week. I am worn out. It's a lot. And so my solution has been to hire more people to do things so that things can move smoothly and there's no bottlenecks in the process of dropping videos. Now I recognize it gets more complicated when it's hundreds of people involved. I know that. And this is the most convenient way to do it. But there's also other ways. I mean, a couple of years ago, NBA 2K bought the IP NBA Playgrounds and they renamed the NBA 2K Playgrounds to Develop by Saber Interactive, which is a pretty reputable dev team in the gaming industry. I don't know if they're actively working on anything since NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 has been out for a minute. Are y'all gonna just took in those people? I know they have an arcade basketball background now, but that might actually be a good thing for what 2K can be. They might actually know how to add and infiltrate some fun into the game that you guys dropped this year. So maybe you just recruit some of those guys to come here. Now, since Take 2 is a publicly traded company, sometimes they have to release things publicly. They can't just keep everything in-house because you can buy and sell their stocks. So there's certain requirements from them because otherwise it might not have made news that they acquired this company or their sales figures look like this this year. We wouldn't have that information because they would have just kept it in-house. 2K said, formally joining visual concepts and 2K allows us to accelerate our impact on the product, the company and Austin's development community. This is like a further push into what you're already seeing. A lot of companies in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco in general or in the surrounding area or in California, if we're being honest, making their way down to Texas where it's cheaper and there's a decent amount of tech geeks there. All just geeking it up, trying to change the world, geeking it up. You see the smile on my face today, fellas. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I'm hoping that NBA 2K 22 is what NBA Street Volume 2 was to NBA Street Volume 1. Volume 1 had the core. Like the gameplay was there, but the experience wasn't. 22 needs to be the one where everything gets put together. The game comes out and you know, it's 2K, so I'm not delusional. I'm not gonna think it's gonna come out polished. Never that. But at least in a playable state. I mean, is the price of goddamn bars so low here? Can the game come out playable this year? We'll see. Current gen launch in 2K 21 was the smoothest launch 2K has had in recent history for me. To see him follow it up with the next gen launch was just a hilarious contrast, highly oxymoronic and very paradoxical ladies and gentlemen. I imagine it's been difficult developing at home. It's probably a lot more boring than it already was because developing already sounds boring. But then to do it at home with no other people around sounds even more boring. And then to do it all the time, like putting in 20 hour days because the game is broken and you need to save it, sounds even more boring. Hey, I got plenty of sympathy for the developers, which is why I kept saying the solution isn't for the devs to work more. They're already putting in 20s. How many all work 20 hours a day? Yo bro, I heard Mike Wang told me he put in an 80 hour week when I was at one of these events. Y'all have never, some of you, 99% of y'all had not put in an 80 hour week in your life. And then to be on left and right from the internet, that has to be tough. So I'm not blaming the devs. They're overwhelmed. Solution was always to hire more developers and I'm gonna close it by just saying thankful that they finally looked in that direction aggressively and they've done that. They've put a smile on my face. Hopefully that means that NBA 2K22 is gonna be as lit as it can be. Now I'm gonna leave the video with a giant smile on my face. Again, it's a huge thank you to Current for helping sponsor this video. Make sure to click the top link and go to current.com slash A-Zero-Zero. Sign up, takes a couple minutes and I'll catch you guys in the next video man. I'm out. Peace.