 After months of speculation, the numbers are finally in, and honestly, they surprised me. Hey, if y'all new to the channel, be sure to subscribe. I just started streaming recently on Twitch. I know! I've been talking about it for so long, I'm finally doing it. I know not everyone can catch every stream if you guys miss moments. I have a link to a new channel I just created in the description. All of the best moments will be uploaded to that channel, so make sure to click it. All right, let's get into it. I woke up to some news, man. I asked myself the question, how's my stock portfolio doing? If y'all remember a couple years ago, I did a meme video on my channel where I bought Take2Stock. Man, I was ecstatic to find out. Take2Stock is up over 5% following the GTA VI announcement. But then I thought like, 5% is a lot for a company that's that large to skyrocket off the announcement of a game that we all knew was coming. There must be something else up, and I was correct. To provide a little bit of context for those who don't know, Take2 is the publisher, the parent company. Take2 owns 2K, which owns NBA 2K. Take2 also owns GTA and games like Red Dead Redemption, LA Noir. Their list of games is pretty deep, and 2K is one of their annual best sellers. So anytime Take2's performance skyrockets, that's usually a good thing for NBA 2K, it means it's doing well. Bro, I don't know how much attention y'all been paying, but my god. The amount of purchases, acquisitions, mergers, this, that, the third. The motivation behind Sony's acquisition of Bungie is to help boost their own abilities to make live service, multi-platform games. So Sony buys Bungie, Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard, Take2 buys Zynga, which is a huge acquisition, and then we find out that we should expect more when it comes to further PlayStation acquisitions. I made a video like six months ago on the channel talking about cross-play and what Epic Games is doing to help push cross-play on games like NBA 2K, because they're making the technology openly available to any developer who wants to use it. That same company, Epic Games, the ones that own Fortnite, the Unreal Engine 5, you name it, received over $400 million in funding from Sony. So left and right, there's big bags being thrown in the gaming space, there's a lot of consolidation happening. The CEO of Take2 says, and I quote, that means they will be really two powerful leading pure-play interactive entertainment companies and we will be one of them. So it's just like a flurry of like massive news, because if Xbox buys Activision Blizzard, Activision could at any point just decide like we don't want to release Call of Duty on the PlayStation no more. Sony bought Bungie, they could decide at any point we don't want to release Destiny on the Xbox no more. So it's hilarious to me when Microsoft comes out with the headline on their website that goes, Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone across every device. That is hysterical. Because they definitely didn't spend over $50 billion for no advantage whatsoever, because the lion's share of that $56 billion they paid was for the Overwatch IP and the Call of Duty IP. Man, on that note, this video right here is brought to you by SeatGeek. Hey, check it out, man. You're going to an event like me. Personally, I went to the Raptors Hawks game. Now let's sit in court aside, got a chance to see my Raptors win. Interesting fact, 16-0. That's the record when I go to watch the Raptors play. They haven't lost yet. I don't know, it's like, I don't know what's going on. Look, man, adventure's coming back. You're going to go to a comedy event, a festival, basketball game, a hockey game, you name it. 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So then I thought, hey, why don't I just search up their earning reports since they have to publish them every single year? Because while it is true that GTA 5 is officially coming to PS5 and Xbox Series XS, these are all features that you most definitely could have got on PC already. So you get excited about graphical updates and audio improvements that you could have already been had. Really doesn't make much sense unless you just don't have a PC that can support those things and maybe a console to do that for you. So this is like the earnings report that Take Two puts together for investors. Obviously, they want investors to be excited about their publishing abilities. This is specifically for quarter three of 2021, which if you do some quick maths is exactly the quarter which NBA 2K drops. So most businesses usually come up with like projections for how they see the growth in their company over the next quarter, over the next year and 2K blew their projections out the fucking water. So they begin by bragging about the success of Rockstar Games and how GTA 5 sold an astronomical 160 million units. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty confident that's like a world record in gaming. If there's a game that sold over 160 million units, I'd be floored. They continue talking about Red Dead Redemption 2 and how it sold 43 million units, which is also nuts. They jump from LA Noir to Midnight Club to Max Payne 3, and then they finally get to 2K. And I look, I'm starting to put my Birdman hands together. They immediately get to bragging. 2K is the best selling basketball simulation. They also have extensions of 2K with NBA 2K online, NBA 2K Playgrounds 2, Mobile, NBA 2K on the Apple Arcade, and NBA Supercard. What the fuck is Supercard? Oh, it's like a card collecting game. Okay, all right, 2K. I guess I'm just a nerd. I love reading through stuff like this because they literally tell us what their motives are. Company growth drivers. And it says key business drivers include investing in the company's strongest development pipeline in its history, expanding our mobile offerings, promoting growth in recurrent consumer spendings, which literally just means more micro transactions, participating in new distribution channels, including streaming, cloud gaming, and direct to consumer. You see them doing that with their Next Maker program. They invite plenty of content creators to be a part of their program, or they give them access to all different types of interesting things in return for being a part of their program and promo in the game. You notice how at no point during that right there, they talked about the quality of the game? They don't do that in these earning reports. I just want you to know the focus of this business is to make money. I just need y'all to know that. But again, the reason why this specific earnings report is really important because this is the main game that dropped in quarter three for take two. So when they say that they beat their projected growth, it means that NBA 2K sold well. So let's look at the numbers. I think because the community feeling about 2K 22 is down here, that people think, oh, the game must have just sold poorly. That couldn't be furthest from the case, brother. If you just take a look at VG charts and you look at the best selling 2Ks of all time, all of them are from like the past few years. The game is trending upwards. You might not always sell better than the last iteration of the game, but the trend is clearly upward. 2K 21, a game that was pretty fucking poorly received, is fourth in all time sales. That's kind of interesting, right? If you looked on YouTube, nobody likes this game, but all the metrics are pointed to the fact that this game sold well. What the fuck? Probably sorry, I'm reading through this so I can like skip to the best parts for y'all. It literally says in this paragraph that take two made an offer to Codemasters and Codemasters decided to go with EA instead. That's very interesting. 2K confirms that fact in this paragraph here. They say the largest contributing to net bookings were and they start off with NBA 2K22. It makes sense, the game just dropped. How'd that make y'all feel? The game sold well. It might not be a career record, who knows? Like we don't have the exact number just yet, it'll come out soon. But it sold well. You would think if you just like listened to other people that like no one is playing this game. In my experience, I think less people are playing the city, but there is a large amount of people just doing regular things like playing out, hopping into my career, bro. It'd be my career fiends. So at the end of the day, when your company is owned by investors, the investors, yeah, they want to make a good game, I guess. At the end of the day, this business's pursuit is making profit. The investors just want to make money. They could give less of a f*** how good the game was. That's why I say like, bro, when it comes to things like 2K, I get how like the devs might watch a video from somebody and get their feedback and now look, okay, the devs know something's wrong with the game. But when I'm talking about like high level changes, man, like someone deciding to do a city again is f***ing crazy. Now I believe the city was a good idea for the story mode, but in terms of multiplayer, bro, I couldn't think of a dumber thing to do than run the city back. But because the recurrent spending in the net bookings, of course they're going to do it again. It worked last year. This is what they be telling their investors, oh, don't even worry about like the unit sold. Like it might not be a career year and you might think that the growth is ending, but you have to look at the other important metrics. At the end of the day, we're here to make money. We want to make our games into a service. I'm telling y'all that's what they say. You know how I f***ing know this? Look at Facebook. And we just type in Facebook stock price right now. That s*** has f***ing plummeted. In the last five days, it took a nosedive. They lost over $200 billion in market share. That's a record in life history. Do you know why? Because for the first time ever, Facebook lost people. Because previously, as people were leaving Facebook, they were getting even more people. But for the first time ever, things trended downwards and immediately people panic. What I'm trying to say is that even if 2K sold poorly, they would package it in a way to where like they'd make it look like it looked good. At the end of the day, these are presentations they put together for their investors. I just need you to understand like what's going on in people's minds when they make the decisions they make about these games. Bro, when you don't get the feature you ask for five years straight and you know like it's a simple feature, like proximity chat. How long have I been asking for proximity chat since 2K18, bro? 2K18, 19, 20, 21, 22. I'm about to fucking get pissed now. Because you mean to tell me this very simple feature can't be added in a video game? It's because, bro, they have their attention in the wrong direction. Y'all know for as long as I've been making these videos, man, I've been saying hire more developers. Take a look at what the fuck I just seen. This is a graph 2K dropped in their earnings report, which is the amount of people that work for the company and it is trending dramatically upwards. We know this because 2K hired VC South. It's a whole new dev team. We didn't know how many people were in the dev team but they bought a whole new dev team. You could see the number of people skyrocket. But the problem with that is, is those people are not working on NBA 2K. They're working on all these other random games 2K has acquired. PGA Tour 2K21, WWE 2K20. Like 2K is just purchasing these IPs and so while it looks like statistically they've added the number of developers, I'm telling you right now, they're not putting them is on 2K, bro. They're not putting those developers on NBA 2K. They're not doing it. And if they are, and it's like, now things are even more split because one dev team is working on current gen and then the other dev team is working on next gen and it's like, bro, how do you not hold back next gen trying to keep up with current gen and now people don't have PS5s and new console? Whoa, bro. But there's one other thing I saw in this report that caught my attention. This is why I love reading stuff like this, bro, because it really shows you like, what the fuck they're thinking. This is a graph of how they expect to be making their money in the next five years. And you can see here that digital console and digital PC are nothing compared to mobile. So in your head, if you're thinking like NBA 2K is making them a lot of money, why is it not getting enough focus? Mobile is already the majority of the income. Not only are mobile games just easier to create, most of the time their mobile products are just like ports from the console games. They have the exact same gameplay as the console game from three years ago. Look at this. The digital console is going to be irrelevant compared to the mobile game. So of course 2K is going to spend more attention on the mobile offering. I mean, they just bragged a moment ago about those three mobile NBA 2K related games they dropped. I'm understanding the video game industry is ruthless and most of the time it's you either got to kill or be killed. But I can't help but like sit back and think, man, there are developers doing fantastic jobs that don't have to compromise profits in order to do that. And I just asked myself like, why can't NBA 2K be one of those games? Why does it always have to feel like what the publisher wants and what the fans want is at odds with one another? It'd be so frustrating, man. Bro, if we run a city back for NBA 2K23, I'm going to lose my mind. But that's a very real chance that they do exactly just that. So while the average person playing NBA 2K22 once things changed, what I'm trying to show you here in this video is that they really don't have much incentive to go out of their way to do that. Why would they take developers off of working on the next game that they can pitch and sell and gas up to investors to work on the existing game that they know is not going to drive that many more sales? It is what it is at the end of the day. I don't even bother getting upset about it no more. I know it's going to be another year where another 2K drops and they won't add like simple things that would transform the way you play the game. They won't do it, which makes it like ever so ironic when they like come out with claims pre-launch about how innovative they are. Because while there were times in 2K history, while 2K went out of their way to innovate with the park, with the crew, with my career, it has been over six years since 2K has done something innovative. Unless you call the neighborhood in the city innovative, but I wouldn't call something that f***ing flopped and made the experience miserable that innovative. Innovative usually comes with positive connotations. I'm curious to see how y'all feel, man. Let me know in the comment section down below. Hey, again, I'm streaming, so it's not 2K. I'm not streaming. Do not come on the stream thinking it's 2K, but if y'all want to see what I'm up to, man, top link in the description. I got all the best moments uploaded to a brand new channel I just launched. Look, if you're already subscribed there, man, there's another video on the screen right now. If you like this one, you'll like that one. I'll see you guys in the next one.