Deja Vu; i've just been in this place before
Here we are again. It's always such a pleasure. Remember when 2K tried to screw us over last? I do. In fact the whole affair is so fresh in my mind that I feel as though I could never forget the multiple heinous ways that 2K sought to definitively prove how poorly they could treat their consumer base. It's almost got to be a competition for them at this point, "How much can we abuse our position of power to milk folk before they stop coming back"? Of course that cannot be the case, because 2K make sports games and the answer to that query would be too obvious; sports fans will buy literally anything that you put in front of them. It's almost like watching a superhero turn bad before your very eyes and wondering idly if they were ever a good person to begin with. I mean, remember seeing the 2K logo pop up whenever I put in Bioshock, so there's some positive connection right there, but to be honest those games were probably more due to the work of Irrational Games than these doofuses. Is there anything positive left to say about 2K at this point?
A year back I was thinking the same thing when their NBA 20 game was struck with the latest in a long line of avaricious controversies; the forced ad drama. Basically, this was a situation in which 2K thought it entirely fair and in keeping with their rights as a publisher to forcibly load adverts in front of games that folk wanted to play. Basically, they were treating their full price sports game, which was already monetised to hell and back, like a free-to-play title chock-full of free ad space. People reacted as you would expect and the move was slowly faded out without any responsibility or public statement being made. To this day I don't know if they completely removed them or just limited the pool to those that didn't complain, but headlines stopped appearing so the problem vanished at least temporarily. For time there was even talk that 2K might have finally done the impossible and surpassed EA in terms of unlikability. (Until EA reclaimed that title just a week or so ago with Ads in their UFC game.)
But you can't keep a multimillion dollar conglomerate down, it would seem, because 2K have returned once again this year to throw back in their third party ads in this year's NBA 21; your welcome, Sports community! And though I hate to throw around comparisons in a practice as honestly vile as this, I'd go so far as to call this worse than EA's UFC implementation. Whereas in that game the ads were ancillary flashes representing 'The Boys' which would pop up just before replays or above the time bar (and the ring itself had some 'The Boys' branding) for NBA 2K21 the game will quite literally halt your loading time between menus in order to show off a full 20 second ad. And no, this isn't just filler to help you pass loading times, (not that it would be any better if it were) the loading itself will slow to a crawl in order to force you to watch the ad. (Very cool, guys. Except not.)
There have been actual outlets that have tried all kinds of tricks to make absolutely sure that these Ads are unskippable, but to be honest that doesn't even matter because the Ads are there at all. This is a full price game that is trying to monetise people's time even further than the core mechanics of the game are already designed to do. In fact, it's not even full price; it's over full! Because the next-gen versions of these sports games have all simultaneous upped their price by an extra 10 dollars for literally no reasons whatsoever. Perhaps they expect us to buy that crap about how development costs are outpacing their ability to produce, but with the lack of effort going into these yearly releases coupled with the incredible profits that these games make, it's hard not to wonder how these people haven't gotten careers in politics with their habitual lying.
And let me be even clearer than I feel I have been throughout this blog; there is absolutely no place in full priced gaming for third party ads. This is something I feel very strong about, on a personal level. Ads are a necessary part of our modern ecosystem that earns it place by worming into places where we consider our entertainment to be free, or at least inexpensive. But even then there are limits. Part of the reason that cord-cutting became so popular is because of the absolute deluge of Ads that folk were subject too on TV, even when paying through the nose for the service as it is. Some folk even download elaborate Ad blocking software on browsers in order to avoid them throughout the Internet. What I'm trying to say is that the balance between adverts and consumers is fragile at best, and with the premium prices that we pay in order to access the latest games, especially with sports games, 2K better know folk will have exactly no chill for their time being wasted in such a manner.
Sure, there is an argument to be made here, as folk always do, that this is a mild inconvenience and thus a non-issue. An extra 20 seconds to the loading time isn't going to make anyone's head fall off and it's only effecting sports games right now anyway. "I don't even play sports games". But as I must reinforce, over and over, this is only ever just the beginning. The reason that we see these stupidly greedy policies get instituted in sports games first is because these companies know how pliable the sports audience can be, and they know that if they can't pull a trick on them, there's no chance they could pull it over the rest of gaming. Therefore if there's ever something vile and unappealing that you see make it's way over to sports you have to call it out there, else it makes it's way to a franchise you love and care about. (And it will. Trust me it will.)
As of right now the issue isn't widespread. In the conniving way that these companies do, 2K have saw it fit to shadow launch this new feature a month after launch (so that it wouldn't effect review scores) and to a limited amount of people. (To limit potential backlash.) But the news has already made it to the outlets so it's likely only a matter of time before the plug is pulled and the team slink back into the darkness, but make no mistake they'll be back again next year! This is the same crap that they pulled last time and you can bet they learnt nothing from it; they're just going to keep testing the waters until we grow too used to it in order to call them out, at which point it'll become a mainstay feature of every one of their games from that point forth. I may sound alarmist, but look at Season Passes, Lootboxes and low-effort Yearly recycle releases, then tell me I'm making mountains out of molehills.
So once again we do this dance of whack-a-mole, 2K pushes the envelope and we shout them down, no ground is made and we all convene again next year to do it again, but meanwhile other liberties get taken. The jacking up of sports game prices has gone over practically unchallenged and many believe this new $70 pricetag might be here to stay, which could start to have an effect on other AAA games in it's orbit. That's how people like this win, they dangle the small bait to rile everyone up whilst sneaking their policies through the backdoor, and time after time we just let them. It's a little galling to think that enriching the gaming space cannot be done in a manner that enriches the player as well, but I suppose this us-vs-them environment is exactly the one that companies like 2K have been trying to build all these years, we'll just see how long it persists before it starts to bring the industry down around our ears. (and I'm only being mostly sarcastic there)
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