The NBA video game industry: More than just vicarious amusement
As a record number of fans tune into this year’s NBA Finals between the Heat and Mavs, they are doing so via a growing number of digital channels and marketing avenues, both online and off. In short time, the NBA’s digital strategy has become the example for other professional leagues to model, and this year’s strong growth in viewership for the playoffs is a likely result of the league being so well connected to its fans.
Due to many good moves on the part of the NBA – like lenient copyright restrictions on fan uploads to YouTube, actively working with bloggers and non-mainstream media sources, and offering premium digital-first content like League Pass and services like StatsCube – David Stern and co. have built a reputation on understanding their new digital audiences while remaining true to their traditional broadcast audiences.
The quick adoption of NBA players, managers and journos to Twitter and social media has been credited with changing the entire culture of the league, both on this very site and others.
There’s also an ever-growing fantasy basketball industry to consider over which millions of man hours are lost in the economy every year.
Underestimated in this explosion of digital offerings is the $10 billion juggernaut in the room: the video game industry.
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Last week, video game developer 2K Sports and the NBA reached a new multi-year agreement that will keep the extremely successful ‘2K’ basketball series an officially-licensed NBA product, and with it legal use of NBA player’s likenesses, names, home courts, logos and all otherwise-copyrighted materials in the game.
This comes after a banner year for the bestselling NBA franchise, namely due to a colossal flop by EA Sports in failing to release NBA Elite 11 (the successor to EA Sports’ storied NBA Live franchise, and NBA 2K11‘s main competition in the marketplace).
Estimates suggest that the NBA Elite flop bumped NBA 2K11‘s sales by as many as 500,000 units, totaling somewhere between four and five million copies (for approximately $60 bucks each).
For 2K Sports re-upping the NBA license is an easy decision, because if a 2K12 basketball game comes out next without that coveted NBA branding, no one is going to buy it*. But what’s in it for the NBA?
*If Ricky Rubio was on the cover, and if his Spanish league team could play Stephon Marbury’s Foshon Dralion’s of the Chinese Basketball Association, then maybe I’ll consider a purchase.
More accurately, what’s in it for the NBA besides millions of dollars in direct licensing and revenue fees pouring into The Association’s coffers?
The answer: a spectacular marketing vehicle that generates the kind of attention that would likely cost millions, tailored perfectly to the needs and desires of an NBA very aware of its public image. A vehicle that grown men like myself pour an hour into every weekday, finishing two 82-game seasons in a calendar year*.
As attention within the NBA fan community shifts from playing last year’s game to getting excited for next year’s installment, the league’s biggest stage – the NBA Finals – seemed as good a place as any to debut a trailer for the new product. Fans got a glimpse of NBA 2K12 when a 30-second trailer was broadcast on ABC. This is the beginning trickle of an ad campaign that will likely flood the eyeballs of NBA fans over the coming months, and one hoping to bank on new audiences gained from NBA Live fans defecting to the 2K-side.
Despite efforts from EA Sports to appease fans and maintain live rosters for the 2010-11 season, without a game released for that year, they likely lost a lion’s share of their market of console-based NBA simulation games.
It won’t be easy for an updated NBA Elite 12 to catch up to the leaps and bounds that 2K seemed to have made in NBA 2K11, and the mighty Vancouver-based gaming giant EA Sports might struggle to bite back some of their share of the market.
It’s more offseason basketball drama for fans of the game on an already shaky NBA foundation. Though there may be two amped up NBA simulation titles competing for our game dollars, there may not even be a season.
* * * * *
If it’s any consolation, EA Sports was also up to something else NBA-related: renewing the NBA Jam franchise both for the latest generation of consoles and mobile/tablet devices, such as the iPad.
*(Game 1 of the Travis Nicholson virtual Finals went down like this: while an injured Kevin Durant sat on the bench, regular season MVP Russell Westbrook led the Bizarro Boston Celtics with a triple double while teammate Kevin Love added 20 points and 18 rebounds in a 108-104 win over his former team, the Minnesota Timberwolves).
It has always been the NBA Jam franchise, originally developed by ’90s gaming giant Midway, that has best represented the opposite of the NBA simulation games. Partly to blame is the fact that most of the basketball games from long ago left a lot to be desired (even for their time), but mostly to blame is the fact that – BOOMSHAKALAKKA!! – Jam was fun as hell to play.
What often gets overlooked is actually how realistic it was in comparison to the other games. Yes, in 1993 NBA Jam was the realistic option.
In the ’80s and ’90s basketball games were geared around notable NBA stars (Jordan vs. Bird: One on One, Magic Johnson’s Basketball, David Robinson’s Supreme Court, Slam City with Scottie Pippen, Barkley Shut Up and Jam, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball) and some only included playoff teams (Lakers Versus Celtics and Bulls Versus Blazers from EA).
When all the games that strived for simulation found themselves to be slow and/or primitively basic, and all the games that wanted fun and excitement turned out to be somewhere between random and impossible, NBA Jam was a fast, high-scoring spectacle that you could actually play.
And actually play as NBA players! Sure, there was no Barkley or Jordan in early NBA games because their likenesses were exclusive to their own games, but in NBA Jam all the other teams were there.
And then as the NBA Jam series went insane with eight-point shots and dunks from past half (jumping 30 feet into the air from the free throw line is one thing, Superman-like windmills from 80 feet out is jumping the shark), the NBA Live series started to incorporate bigger dunks and broken backboards while developing the necessary game engines to understand boxing out and pick-and-rolls.
As the 2K series picked up steam early in the 2000s, largely due to the development of a 3D gaming area as opposed to the 2D pseudo-side view of the earliest games, 2K importantly became the choice of NBA stars themselves like LeBron James, Andre Iguodala and Nate Robinson. Suddenly it’s like it was almost cool to play video games… or something.
Throughout this last decade, these simulation titles dominated the market. As the NBA Jam series tanked a run of titles, forcing Midway to abandon it altogether, other arcade-style basketball games came and went (such as EA’s NBA Street series) often having their entire games absorbed into side features of games that would come out within the next few years.
As the gameplay improved, so did the extra features, and soon these games also became little places where NBA nerds could experiment with being a general manager, making trades, running teams for entire seasons, mock drafts, planning a rotation and creating an offense and then actually commanding all the players to do the things you want to, like a GOD.
Not everything is there that we want. There will always still be things I want to see in basketball video games that I likely never will, whether that be because the league insists its best left out (flagrant fouls in a heated playoff series, an “unreliable officiating” option) or because I’m too greedy (the Live Rosters function to also update haircuts and tattoos, a uniform edit screen ala Madden 11).
For such a guarded and reserved league as the NBA to do anything like that would be out of character. It’s very likely that developers at 2K have already asked the NBA if they could program the refs with an option to include wildly fluctuating foul calls or to let users crack someone Andrew Bynum-on-Jose Barea style in the heat of battle – regardless, it would have been promprtly rejected.
There are just some things we can’t have. NBA 2K11 is a perfect little microcosm of the NBA, crafted in a very particular way to reflect the images that the league desires to project.
In this new era where social media is king, the NBA is a skilled organization at controlling its image, the league has seen increased viewership and a tremendous level of fan engagement across a variety of channels. Key to the success of the NBA’s digital strategy moving forward is the ability to connect to younger audiences in new forms; video games will undoubtedly be a large part of that connection.
The economics of these games, with millions poured into production and more millions poured into marketing, are an under-valued asset for the league’s global marketing machine. When the NBPA and owners negotiate a new CBA this season, licensing rights will likely be a part of the conversation.
For many of us, these are games that allows us to slip vicariously into the role of an NBA player or GM. If I want to trade Rajon Rondo for Westbrook and Kevin Garnett back to the Timberwolves for Kevin Love, so be it, it’s my game and I need a point guard who can shoot*.
It’s a fantasy basketball world, a fully executable simulation engine, a basketball universe governed by me without logic or common sense. All the crazy things I want to do, I can do in a virtual recreation of my wildest basketball imagination.
And every minute I spend glued to an XBox applauding my very own virtual NBA universe, the league’s strategically-crafted digital presence continues to evolve.
*Not to mention that even my electronic conscience doesn’t want to see Love waste away losing in a small market.
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