Unlike American football and baseball, NBA does not have an exclusivity deal with 2K, last I heard. It’s just that their competitors always made worse games, and 2K was all that survived. There isn’t even an off-brand basketball game to turn to without the NBA license. If you want video game basketball, this is basically all there is.
So I actually used to work on NBA2K. NBA Live used to be considered the superior game. One year, they missed their deadline and had to delay the game. This caused all the basketball fans to buy NBA2K. They all decided it was better and NBA Live never regained their lead, which lead us to today. Visual Concepts is now very adamant about never delaying the game, which is why there is a yearly crunch, devs get paid overtime, and they avoid feature creep aggressively.
Yeah, mine was more an abbreviated history. If memory serves, that one delayed NBA Live was actually cancelled after review copies went out, which only a handful of games have ever done. As I remember the likes of Jeff Gerstmann telling it, that was the exact inflection point. Though I’ll admit I haven’t purchased a basketball game since the N64.
Unlike American football and baseball, NBA does not have an exclusivity deal with 2K, last I heard. It’s just that their competitors always made worse games, and 2K was all that survived. There isn’t even an off-brand basketball game to turn to without the NBA license. If you want video game basketball, this is basically all there is.
So I actually used to work on NBA2K. NBA Live used to be considered the superior game. One year, they missed their deadline and had to delay the game. This caused all the basketball fans to buy NBA2K. They all decided it was better and NBA Live never regained their lead, which lead us to today. Visual Concepts is now very adamant about never delaying the game, which is why there is a yearly crunch, devs get paid overtime, and they avoid feature creep aggressively.
Yeah, mine was more an abbreviated history. If memory serves, that one delayed NBA Live was actually cancelled after review copies went out, which only a handful of games have ever done. As I remember the likes of Jeff Gerstmann telling it, that was the exact inflection point. Though I’ll admit I haven’t purchased a basketball game since the N64.
Damn that is shitty.
I imagine the genre is extra starved for projects, as a lot of the nerds that would typically recreate it aren’t into sports.