Now that there's no pretense that you're gambling in 2K NBA Basketball...

Now that there’s absolutely no pretense that you’re gambling in 2K Basketball where does it leave this game and the industry as far as gambling directed at children? Because this is shuttling kids through the door to get them addicted to further forms of gambling.

Seeing how you can buy all this stuff with money and card or stubs are just a prefix for money, it’s a direct line of credit to one’s bank account. Does someone/ anyone do something about this outside the country of Belgium?

Is the game free to play? I don’t follow sports games at all anymore.

No you buy if for $60 and then if you’re like my addicted nephew, you spend every cent you get for birthdays and holidays on the stubs in the game (or whatever the name of their currency is). Seriously, he must spend $500 a year or more on it. It’s so sad as the next year he sees all that money was wasted and still does it again.

Free to play is so two years ago. These days Pay to Pay is where it’s at. Perhaps Artifact was simply slightly ahead of its time (or merely had the wrong audience).

Do we have 2 threads on this now? I saw one linked in JP’s original post that looks like its on the same topic.

This is not just discussing 2k, but all these games in general. The industry has kept a thin veneer to try and claim it’s not gambling, but now 2K has apparently said, “To hell with it”, and gone full tilt ahead screaming, “just you try and stop us!” I can’t help but wonder if EA is cringing, or salivating at what’s going on here. After all that happened with Battlefront 2 they’re probably going, “that’s not fair!”

So this is going on in Baseball and Football games as well? Crazy.

I remember when people complained about having to buy roster updates. :P

This is why they do sports games nowadays. The $60 roster updates weren’t nearly enough money. It’s in baseball, football, hockey, basketball, soccer. I don’t know about EA’s UFC game.

I think you are considering them to have much more thinking than people infected with common greediness usually have ;)

So dumb question, why not just keep playing last years game, with the roster update? :)

There’s never any real roster update for last year’s game. And what they do is they dangle some incremental update to the game to entice people to buy the new one. It’s laughable how absurd it is.

This is horrible. A buddy at work is bummed because his son spent a ton on last years game and this year has a job…

Edit: are there two threads for this?

You can always tell which folks look at the front page of the site.

There’s a front page on the site?

To be fair, with the news threads bumping around depedning on the phases of the moon, having a dedicated thread isn’t that bad.

???

So in the single player career mode all the gear items you might want to outfit your character in, like sneakers and other athletic gear on the court, and clothing off the court (also tattoos and haircuts) are all paid for by virtual currency. You earn this by grinding away at the game (the grind has become insane, it absolutely puts free to play mobile games to shame) or you can buy this currency from 2k servers ($99 best value yo)

But it’s not only cosmetics you buy, you have to buy your shot types, dunk types, dribble style, etc etc and you ALSO have to buy your character stats (3 point accuracy, speed, strength, passing accuracy etc) You basically pay for everything either through grinding or real life money. Now you might say “I’ll just grind away in my own time, no need to hurry or pay extra” but the problem is they turn off the servers after about 2 years (2k16 is dead, so is 17, not sure about 18) so while you can still grind to upgrade your stats, you can no longer buy new jump shots say, or different types of dunks. And the default ones you start out with are so poor you’d think your ingame character had never even seen a basketball in his life.

You can also lose the currency you earned by making mistakes on the court, not sure if that happens when you pay actual cash for their VC because I never gave them a dime, but it does happen with the VC that you grind out of the games cold dead hand.

Wow, this is a new level of fuckery I’d never even considered before.

I’d rage quit right there.

Surely the Gaming Boards of various states need to get involved and start throwing their considerable weight around in order to get their cut.