By Gavin Boyle
NBA 2K announced plans to revamp its competitive league, emphasizing the draw of basketball to pull in an audience who is not particularly interested in gaming.
“The idea is, show [casual fans] a good time and make sure that good time is related to NBA 2K,” said Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of NBA 2K creator Take-Two Interactive. “And the NBA 2K universe is huge. It’s not just a simulation game, it’s a lifestyle. It used to be that we put the game out, people would play it for a couple of months and then go on to the rest of their life.”
“Now, NBA 2K is a reflection of a cultural interest in all things basketball, in the same way that when you watch a basketball game in person, you’re not just there to see the game, you’re there to be with your friends and have some food and to cheer and to wear this shirt, and you’re there for affinity and an experience, not just the game itself,” Zelnick continued. “So with NBA 2K, there’s the game itself, the sim, which is amazing and the best there is, and there’s everything surrounding that.”
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To help draw a large audience, the new NBA 2K league will focus heavily on including real life NBA players and innovative fan experiences, while also highlighting the skill of the best NBA 2K players in the world.
“The video game sits at the intersection of basketball, gaming and pop culture in a really powerful way now, now more than ever, and the concept of the 2K League is essentially to bring that to life by putting NBA players, celebrities, creators and regular fans in an entertainment universe,” NBA Take-Two Media CEO Andrew Perlmutter told The Hollywood Reporter.
The main way the league hopes to connect everyday fans with celebrities and pro basketball players is through open bracket tournaments that connect top-placing players with stars. Meanwhile, basketball creator Jesser has been chosen to represent the league as its honorary commissioner, bringing energy and creativity to the league’s content.
“I feel like the ecosystem is really blending, the creators have built a new lane in terms of the content they’re making, where each creator is their own production company and making their own sports content, and now they’re merging more with traditional sports,” Jesser, who boasts over 35 million subscribers on YouTube, told The Hollywood Reporter in October when discussing how sports content creators are overlapping with professional leagues.
As gaming becomes ever more popular in today’s world, it will be interesting to see how this engagement-driven league will perform. It may serve as the new model, especially for sport-based video games, as it allows fans to get connected with the biggest stars in the game.
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