The Press Box - Ep. 257: 'Achievement Oriented' on Rockstar's Golden Goose and the Consolidation of Sports Games

Episode Date: February 10, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion discuss PS4 Pro envy and 'Resident Evil 7' (0:40) and talk to The Guardian's games editor Keith Stuart about the continued sales success of 'Grand Theft Auto V,' the perpetual repackaging of old titles, and the worst US presidents in video games (6:08). Lastly, they talk to Polygon's Owen Good about the latest bad news for NBA Live, why so many sports games are going extinct, and the NBA's plans to partner with Take-Two to launch an official 'NBA 2K' esports league (26:05). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's macwellden.com, get 20% off using promo code achievement. And good luck with your Valentine's Day date. And welcome to Achievement Oriented. Channel 33's gaming podcast. I am Ben Lindberg of the ringer.com. On the other line is Patronis is Charles Oakley. It's Jason Concepcion. Hey, Jason.

Free Oak! You got to free him. You just confessed to me that you're a cable vision subscriber. What do you think Oak would say about that? I feel, believe me, I'm conflicted about it, but I just don't have a lot of choice in the matter. I'm not yet at the place where I feel comfortable cable cutting. And where I live, you either can't. You can do satellite or you can do cable vision.

And with Dolan's kind of pugilistic attitude towards other companies, it's kind of a risk that I might lose the ability to watch the Nix on television, which is sad that that directs my actions in this regard. But that's the truth. And that's just how it is. Yeah, that would really hurt your brand. Yeah. And where I am in Manhattan, I have Time Warner Cable, which is the subject of a new lawsuit, which was brought on behalf. of League of Legends players in part. Data from Riot helped shine some light on Time Warner Cables practices.

Evidently, they've been restricting download speeds. The more you were paying for Internet, the less you were getting for your money. So good job, Riot, I guess, for exposing that. A fun thing to do is to just search Time Warner Cable on Yelp and just read everything that's on there. It's a fun time, and I urge people to do it. So I am experiencing some console dissatisfaction right now. You know how last year we talked about our dread about the mid-generation console update and how this was going to make us feel dissatisfied with the current state of our consoles?

And I was feeling fine about the PS4 Pro. I wasn't running out to get one until this forthcoming. 4.5 update that includes the boost mode. And the boost mode, even if a game is not built to be optimized by PS4 Pro, it can be if you activate the boost mode, the textures will load more quickly, the frame rate will be better with most games. And so now all of a sudden I'm seeing these side-by-side comparisons of all these games running on a plain old PS4 and on a fancy PS4 pro.

And the frame rate numbers are right there for me to see. I can't pretend that it wouldn't be better for me to play on PS4 Pro. And suddenly my old trusty PS4 just looks last gen to me. They got you. They got me. This is exactly what I have enjoyed not feeling as a console gamer for the last, however many years I've been playing console games. This is the feeling that I used to experience as a PC player whose graphics card was out of date a month after I bought it. And here we are back in the same boat.

Well, I think part of the brilliance of Sony in this regard is that they called the updated mode boost mode. Yeah. It's like genius branding on their part. Yeah. This reminds me of the Genesis's. Genesis is. This reminds me of the blast processing in the Sega Genesis that was just sort of a fancy term for something that didn't do all that much. And it was built in from the start.

But when they were competing with Nintendo, they started. they started talking about blast processing and it sounded like this fancy new thing that no other console had. And now we've got boost mode and it's working on me. It's wearing me down. If you get the PS4 Pro and you end up with the PSVR at some point, you got to play Resident E double 7, which I've been playing this week. Yeah, very brave of you. I'm not a big horror survival fan, but I got to tell you, I was playing with headphones. And there was one section where I had to go down a set of very rickety stairs into the dark. and you could hear like this kind of weird muleing sound down there.

And I just had to pause the game for 10 minutes. I was like, no, I can't. I can't right now. I have to, I have to like get a drink and pause this game for 10 minutes and like steal myself for this because I just can't do it. Yeah, you are a braver man than I. I don't know if I've ever finished a game scarier than eternal darkness for GameCube. I hope that in an upcoming episode we'll do a segment on coping with horror games.

If you are a fear afflicted player like we are like I am especially, we're not even talking about VR, you're playing the old-fashioned way. The old-fashioned way with the regular old peepers in the flat screen. All right. So later in this episode, we are going to talk to Owen Good from Polygon about the continuing consolidation of sports franchises. Used to be lots of options in the sports space. And now there's really just one game for each sport.

We're going to talk about how we got to this point. But first, we are going to talk about. that miracle of capitalism. Rockstars smash hit in 2013, smash hit in 2017, Grand Theft Auto5. So last year, overall software and hardware sales were down from 2015 and many big budget games reported disappointing totals, but Grand Theft Auto5, which is now almost three and a half years old, continued to be a juggernaut, according to publisher Take 2, whose share price hit an all-time high earlier this week after it announced that it had exceeded third quarter earnings

estimates, GTA 5 has sold 75 million copies, roughly three times as many as either San Andreas or GTA 4. That makes it the fourth best-selling game of all time after Tetris, Minecraft, and Wii Sports, which doesn't really count because it was a pack-in game. So to explain the game's extremely long lifespan, we're talking to Keith Stewart, the games editor for The Guardian, who wrote a column earlier this week in which he asked the question, why are people still buying Grand Theft Auto 5? And we are going to ask him the same question.

So welcome, Keith. Hello. So for me, GTA5 feels like a long time ago. I played it with a friend in one weekend long marathon right after the release. And then I basically never touched it again. So obviously, I have missed a ton in the interim. So can you tell us a little bit about how the game has evolved and how Rockstar has kept people coming back all this time?

Yeah, sure. I mean, the basic experience of Grand Theft Auto 5, the kind of narrative experience, has pretty much stayed the same over the last three years. But what Rockstar has done is they have, there's a component of GTA 5 called GTA online, which is the 30 player online multiplayer version of the game, which gives you access to the world of Grand Theft Auto. But you play quests and tasks, and things within that world with other people and against other people. That has been continually upgraded for the last three years. So they've added new weapons, new vehicles, new modes. They're continually updating it and tweaking it.

I think this is one of the reasons why it's become so successful. But it's also certainly that it's the fact that Grand Theft Auto experience is just so diverse and large. Not only do you have this crazy gangster story with Trevor and Myrower. and all those bizarre characters. But you also have this kind of living, breeding world in which players can do lots and lots of different stuff. You can play golf, you can play tennis, you can just drive around, you can go hiking. So what Grand Theft Auto is is not just a game with a narrative experience.

It's actually a whole world. It's a universe. It's a recreational space. And I think this is very much where game design is heading in the future, away from providing players with one experience that everybody has. towards this idea almost of games as being virtual tourist locations. So the world is there for you to do what you want. So there's really two things.

It's the fact that the basic game itself is so open and broad, but also you have this Grand Theft also online component, which is being constantly tweaked and updated by Rockstar. And those two things together have made it into this phenomenon. Can you kind of describe what GTA Online's gameplay looks like now? Like what are the available modes or how has it evolved or can you compare it to any other online game? There aren't that many online games like it. And essentially in GTA online, it's a series of experiences. So what you can do is when you enter the game, you enter the city of Los Santos and the surrounding areas.

And dotted around the map, there are little missions or little areas where you can join in sort of team-based death match multiplayer. environments or you might find somewhere where you can join in a road race against other players. So you have these little nuggets of competitive play which are distributed around the map. So you just explore, find an area, join in and you might get yourself into a death match for which you will earn points, in-game points. And then you can use that in-game cash to buy new weapons, new cars. So these are dotted around the environment. Most importantly, I think, was the fact that I think maybe a year after the game came out,

Rockstar introduced online heists, which are these kind of much more in-depth, almost narrative mini-missions for a small group of players and they're cooperatives. You get together and you do things like raid the luxury yacht of a billionaire to steal all of his cash. And those are much more like get-together with your friends on a Friday evening. and what could be more friend from get-together with your friends on a Friday evening and trashing someone's yachts. So I think adding stuff like that,

I think the culminative effect has been very dramatic in terms of keeping people engaged. They also added the potential to own your own buildings, your own real estate within the Grand Theft Auto online world. So you can sort of go from a kind of lowly, shabby, single-bed apartment to a massive penthouse suite somewhere just by earning in-game tokens and cash. So there's this sense that it's a kind of a living, breathing world in which you play a kind of anarchic, capitalistic role.

And people have become, it's become their leisure space, it's become what they do, you know, almost every night. And even now, GTA online has got over 8 million monthly subscribers. So there's people, there's almost 10 million people playing GTA online regularly, even three years after it was brought out. In fact, I think last December's results were higher than the original kind of years results in terms of how many people are playing. So year on year, more people are playing GTA Online, which is just phenomenal. And the only other sort of instances I can think of of gameplay like this are things like Destiny and Ubisoft's game, the division, which have both been reasonably successful in this same kind of sector, of getting people to play quite narrative-driven online multiplayer titles for. like over a year.

It struck me when I was playing a GTA, when I was really heavily into it, how essentially the goal of the game is to acquire cars and bigger houses. So it's essentially just like real life, only much easier to accomplish those things. What do you think, I mean, this is kind of more a general question, but what do you see happening to society when people are able to find more enjoyment in virtual spaces than in real ones? I think that's a really fascinating question, and I think we're maybe in some ways heading in that direction. I think it's very difficult to say because the obvious thing to say would be it's isolating.

So if people aren't going out as much and they're not meeting people as much in the real world and they're spending more of their time in virtual communities, then are we heading towards an isolated society where physical contact becomes rarer? And I don't think that's the case. I think people tend to divide up their screen time these days rather than dividing up all of their leisure time. So I think a lot of people probably have time that they're prepared to spend with a screen. So you might spend that time with Netflix or you might spend that time surfing the internet

or being on social media or you might spend that time in video games. And I don't think for most people that that's not competing against the time they're going out. So I don't have this kind of apocalyptic vision of a matrix-like society in which people are constantly embedded in virtual worlds. But I do think we're heading towards an interesting era where the big entertainment conglomerates, the Amazon's, the Googles, the Facebooks,

and the big video game publishers are all going to be competing for that screen time and how consumers use that time. But I think what's interesting about GTA, and you really picked up on it there, is that it's effectively a kind of a capitalist dream scenario. And if you think about Generation Z and the millennials, they are coming into a culture and society in which it's becoming increasingly difficult

to live an aspirational consumer lifestyle. It's very difficult to get on the property market. It's quite difficult to afford cars these days. So lots of the dreams that we were sold in the 60s and 70s that maybe our baby boomer parents got to live out, those are kind of almost beyond reason now for the current generation. So video games in some ways are an outlet for those kind of lost aspirations that, you know, lots of people are just never going to be able to afford to have houses,

and especially not luxury yachts and not sports cars. So GTA is kind of a fantasy around the capitalist dream that, you know, that maybe existed 20, 30 years ago, but certainly doesn't anymore. Yeah. When I first finished the game, I remember discussing with some friends, the pros and cons of buying the golf course, whether it was worth the money. I don't think I'll be having that conversation in real life anytime soon. It would be more like discussing whether you can afford a golf club. Yeah, I think it would be.

Has this taken rock star by surprise at all? I'm sure that they thought they figured their game would be successful. But this successful? How long do they plan to support it for? of any sense of that? It's very difficult to tell with Rockstar because they're a very secretive and very confident company.

They have a lot of confidence in what they produce. So they will probably tell you, yes, we knew this all along. But I very much doubt that they knew, they wouldn't have known that they'd still be supporting

GTA online three years after the game's development. And the fact that it's made something like, you know, in April last year, Forbes did a new story where they discovered that GTA Online had made over $500 million dollars in micro transactions.

I don't think anybody could have foreseen that. And especially because in GTA online, everything that you purchase with real cash, you can purchase through just play in the game and achieving in the various kind of quests and death matches. So the fact that people are still prepared to put in real money into this game is incredible. So no, I don't think Rockstar could have known it. And to be honest, I think they're going to support this thing indefinitely. because they're making money from virtual goods,

which is reasonably cheap to produce. They have hundreds of development staff working at Rockstar North in Edinburgh and around the world, studios around the world. So producing new car models, new vehicle models, new game modes, isn't that expensive for them? There's no manufacturing, there's no distribution costs. So they're making money from virtual goods in a way

that you can't have imagined even a decade ago. So I think they're going to continue to support this. And I think it's very likely when Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out later this year, which is Rockstar's next really, really big game. It's their kind of Western adventure game. I'd be incredibly surprised and shocked if there wasn't a Red Dead Redemption online game, similar CitiDhi Online with a very, very similar economics and mechanics in it. Right. That's kind of the question is like when will there be a next one or when do you, you know, if this one is still minting money, when do you decide to.

pull the plug on five and put something else out there if you're just kind of cannibalizing your own profits on the existing older game. Yeah, I think, I mean, they're going to have to produce a new narrative. So they definitely can do a GTA 6, but I wonder if it will house GTA online as a cross-platform, cross-game thing rather than introducing a new GTA online. So yeah, I think they'll keep that going within, but yeah, they'll definitely be GTA 6, but it won't be for at least two years, maybe three. Yeah, so I mean, when any game is this enormously successful, other developers are going to look at this and wonder what they can take from this model to try to get a piece of the pie. So do you see any elements of GTA online and GTA5 success that other people can copy? Or is this really something that is unique to GTA and unique to Rockstar because of the incredible quality of the game and the history of the franchise?

Yeah, I think a lot of, I think really GTA 5, sorry, is a perfect storm, really, of ingredients. So they have the development staff who are some of the most talented developers in the world. They have, they have the whole history of the franchise. And those are things that they all now can copy. But the technical elements of what they're doing, huge open world environment, monetized online infrastructure, those are things that other people are copying. We have seen over the last couple of years titles like Destiny and the division working in a very similar space, and we're going to continue to see that.

We've also seen games like Call of Duty introducing monetised supply packs into their multiplayer game. So we're seeing this whole kind of idea of freemium economics, so paying for micro-transactions, paying for in-game goods, coming into the AAA console and PC gaming sector now. And I think that's very much inspired by the success of GTA on. line. So, you know, things like Destiny and the division are going to continue. Call of Duty is going to continue to do that. We've also seen interesting things happening with FIFA and John Madden games in terms of the ultimate team modes, which allows you to trade, transfer, and sell players. Again, this is a really interesting use of micro-transactions within the

mainstream video game space. And again, I'm sure they were looking at GTA and thinking, wow, we've got to copy that. But I'm not sure that anyone really is going to produce anything like GTA5 again in a similar way, just because all the pieces line up for Rockstar in a way that they don't really line up for anyone else. And you drew some parallels in your column to other forms of media and repackaging and that kind of thing. Can you explain what other areas you see that are sort of similar to the way that Rockstar has gone about selling and reselling this game? And do you think there is a limit to it. Is there a certain number of times

you can repackage something and still have it appealed to consumers? Or is the key just adding something new every time to bring people back? How long can they keep this thing going? Yeah. I mean, I think what the movie, the home video and music industries

have taught us is no, there is no limit to how many times you can repackage or resell something. And what is said in my article is that the way that Rockstar have handled GTA5 has been really, really similar to the way that music companies repackage and resell their classic albums. So if you look at an album like, I don't know, Brothers in Arms by Dias Straits or Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, these are albums that have been repackaged, redistributed on various different technologies since the, you know, 70s and 80s. So you'll get rumours now on CD vinyl, high spec, 100 gram, virgin vinyl.

so you know and people people will buy it and and what's interesting about grandpett also five is we're seeing the same kind of thing there so people bought it on on xbox 360 but then when the ps4 and xbox one versions came out those people were offered exclusive content so it's almost like being offered that version of fleet with max rumors or any album where it will say okay buy it now on CD in this deluxe 20th anniversary pack and you get all these demos on the, you know, and B-sides that have never released. And people can't, you know, there's still that kind of collector instinct and a lot of people. And it still lives in technology as much as it's in music and video.

So, yeah, they've totally tuned into that. So Grand Theftalto 5, it's like I said at the end of my article in a jokey way, it's kind of like a dad rock of video games. Yes. You know, we all, you know, we all have dads that will go out and buy the next, you know, ACDC or Led Zeppelin albums over and over and over again. So it's in some ways it's exactly the same model. Yeah. And it's not like they're even digging up some obscure studio demo or something that they can call an unreleased track. They're making significant changes. Like the first person

mode from what I understand really dramatically changes the experience of playing the game. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And they were clever in what they added as well when they transfer from PS3 and Xbox 360 to Xbox 1 and PS4, because they did add that whole mode, which yeah, completely changes your relationship with the characters and with the world. It's really interesting how much more immersive it is and how much the dark, almost kind of cynical, sardonic violence becomes, has a very different feel to it. But also they did things like enlivened the world. So they added new nature, a new wildlife to the world. So, and you think, you know, who cares about that in Grand Theft Auto 5? But,

lots of people do because lots of people will buy a bike or an off-road car and just go out across the landscape and see what they can spot. So the fact there's new things to find out there is almost just as important, which I think is kind of beautiful in a way that, you know, people don't want to just buy the latest AK-40s ever in the game. They also want to see the latest animals. And that's cool. So yeah, they were really smart in how they introduced content that wasn't just the, you know, the basic stuff you need to play the game, but also the exterior, ephemeral things that make the world like a living, breathing space. I once tweeted that one day we will have, the United States of America will have a president

that killed a prostitute in a grand theft auto game. So switching gears, you recently wrote a six worst U.S. presidents in video game history article, which, you know, I don't know why you would write that at this current moment of history. It's just seems to be serious. But if you had to pick one terrible video. game president, who would you pick? Oh, that's a difficult question, because when I came up with those completely by random on

that day. Yes, of course. They were all so good. I would say, I really like Howard T. Ackerman from Command and Conquer 3, who was played by an excellent actor, obviously, we all know from the Whipash film. But he was great because he was most like a certain character that doesn't live too far away from the White House in terms of that there's a lot of speech, but not much credible, sane action. So, yeah, it feels, he feels quite relevant. So I'll go for him.

Personally, I would go with Adam Benford just because he was an actual zombie. Yeah. And also the President of the United States. But, yeah, I also agree with the Howard T. Ackerman was bad. And you can actually watch his campaign commercials on YouTube. Oh, yeah. So if you are the one person in the world who hasn't played GTA 5 yet, now you know what you've been missing, you can go help prop up poor rock stars profits in the next quarter. And you can follow Keith on Twitter at Keith Stewart and read him at The Guardian. Thanks, Keith. Thank you very much for having me. All right.

We'll be right back with Owen Good from Polygon to talk about sports games. So even if you are not a big fan of sports games, you probably remember a time when there was a variety of options. available for all the major sports. Admittedly, some of those options were awful, but there was at least the illusion of choice every year. And earlier this month, Electronic Arts announced that it was, well, it's hard to describe what it was doing.

You could say delaying, but you could also say canceling the next edition of NBA Live, a series that seems to be on Life Support, which prompted Owen Good, a reporter for Polygon, and a longtime writer about sports video games to write. And I'm quoting that over the past 12 years, sports video games have now hardened to one title per league and also to opine that

this lack of variety is more proof that sports have run out of things to say in the video games conversation despite the enormous contribution they make to the annual sales picture. So we are joined now by Owen to figure out how we got here. Hey, Owen. Hey, thanks for having me on the podcast, Ben. Yeah, happy to. So for people who don't play sports games or are only into one or two sports, can you kind of layout the landscape as it stands now, the major players in each big sport? Well, there's EA

sports and there's 2K sports. And then if you want Major League Baseball, you have to have a PlayStation 4 because Sony is the only one who makes the what they call simulation quality game for consoles. MLB Advanced Media does, they did revitalize RBI baseball, but that's a different story altogether. This is a lot different from what people might remember. I know that 10 years ago in video game time is like astronomical in terms of what was different then. But I think that there still is an assumption that people have that there's a lot more either variety or competition out there. And there just, frankly, is not. And it has a lot to do with development costs and with licensing costs. And it has a lot to do with expectations not only of investors, but also now of the leagues

themselves, who I think have, especially since the NFL adopted an exclusive licensing posture, not just for video games, but with pretty much all of its products because it's the NFL, they really understand the value that their brand's command, and they want to get the premium for an exclusive partnership. And it also means that they have fewer management costs, you know, when you have fewer partners to deal with, even if you're still making the same amount of money. So what you've got really is, as I said in the column, you know, one title per league. And I know that pro evolution soccer, which a lot of people, a lot of soccer cognoscenti, you know, view as the true simulation. Yes.

And it certainly, it definitely was the case when both launched back in the, when it and EA Sports FIFA series launched back in September, FIFA had a real problem out of the gate with its AI. But at the same time, FIFA, thanks to EA sports and its relationships and aggression with, you know, the Premier League control pretty much the exclusive license to the Premier League, which would be the NFL of soccer. And yes, there's Syria A.A.A., you know, there's Spain, there's all sorts of other domestic leagues in Europe. But if you're talking about the market that's the richest and has the most growth, that's the one you want. and Pro Evolution has here and there a couple of teams, I think, but not certainly not the whole league and not the presentation that FIFA has. And so that's the only real qualifier I have in this to, you know, there's only one game per league. That's not entirely an accurate statement, but it is, I think, substantially accurate when you look at the choices people make and why

they would make them to play a sports title. And you really do feel like if you want the Premier League, you have only one game. If you want Major League Baseball with, you know, a season and all of the intrigue of trading and development, you know, you've got the show. If you want to play the NBA with those same features, it's NBA 2K and we'll get into, you know, the rest of that. I mean, I don't think a lot of people really expected NBA Live to come out, but it still technically was on offer and it didn't. You know, Madden, obviously is Madden. So there's only one NASCAR video game. stock car racing. There's only one Formula One video game if you want that. And it's not to say that every one of these leagues had multiple titles in the past, multiple head-to-head titles. I mean,

some of them have multiple titles in the sense that you would have arcade-style titles. And the NBA was really good about this because you were talking about NBA Street and NBA Jam and NBA Ballers. But I think what has happened is just, I mean, with NBA Ballers, as an example, Midway went out of business. And, you know, it was a very good. victim of, I guess, over-expansion or over-licensing in the middle part of the last decade, the kinds of things that you saw with publishers like THQ. And the costs have gotten bigger because the leagues expect a lot. And the development has gotten to the point where they can't really justify it on paper

before they, you know, say, yes, we'll go in and do it. How this redounds to NBA Live, I have some thoughts on that. But it just, it is. If you want the NBA, you've really got only one. title. You don't even have NBA jam. I mean, you do in the sense that you could go buy it off a download service because they haven't. EA Sports hasn't taken it away from mobile, hasn't taken it away from the PlayStation store or Xbox Live. And in fact, I think it's backward compatible to Xbox One now. I think I read that. But again, you know, those were rosters from five years ago.

So it's again, if you really like basketball, I hope you really like NBA 2K because there's nothing else to choose from. For basically a decade, starting in the mid-90s, NBA Live was the king. I mean, I think for a lot of people, basketball fans, gamers of my generation, we were weaned on that game. 2K arrived as exclusive to the Sega Dreamcast, great console that was ahead of its time, didn't really make it that much of a cultural impact. And then within five, six years, NBA Live was second best, and then by essentially 2010, it was gone. And there have been several aborted attempts to revive the franchise that have ended in kind of like almost comical disgrace at times. What happened? What happened?

Well, okay. I mean, if you want to get really wonky about it, what happened was 2009, NBA Live 10 comes out and NBA 2K10 comes out. And they are the closest if you care about Metacritic as a true rating of games quality. They are the closest in Metacritic score that the franchises have been in, I think, ever. You're very right about the 2K sports line and its origins and it overtaking NBA live. But it looked like this thing was finally coming back. And they had a guy, they had lured away from visual concepts, the makers of NBA 2K and the 2K sports line. They'd lured away Mike Wang up to EA Canada. And they made a high quality, well-polished, great basketball simulation with all the modes that you had.

expect. It didn't do anything. You've seen all of these wonderful set pieces that 2K sports has done since, you know, like the Jordan Challenge or NBA's greatest or that kind of stuff. NBA Live 10 didn't do anything like that, but it was a very good game, very solid game, great on defense, great on passing, as I remember it, a really good entry. And then they just decided to throw it away. There was, to my understanding, a difference of opinion in the game's direction, or at least the series is direction between Mike Wang and the leadership at EA Canada, or at least the departmental leadership there, they wanted to go into this design philosophy that was very much like the NHL series, which also is made out of EA Canada in British Columbia, which was, you know,

with the twin analog sticks, you know, your left hand was going to control your feet and your right hand controls your hands. And so, you know, if you can get people to buy into that, you could get a level of motion and fidelity to it that was similar to the kind of gameplay, which had been widely praised in NHL. But what they failed to consider was that they were essentially just remaking NBA Live from the ground up. And they were going to call it NBA Elite 11. And the demonstration that they showed at E3 in 2010, as I remember, it was pretty much, you know, you were in a gym and you were standing there and there was like one guy facing you. And it was a guided demonstration and I remember my handler saying, okay, this is how you do a head fake,

this is how you do a hesitation, this is how you do a jump shot, and that kind of stuff. And I think that that part was included in this infamous demo that went out in September of that year, which was absolutely glitch-filled, looked nothing like the basketball that people expect to see. And this is always a problem with sports video games is because people are conditioned to what they see on the television. And this looked nothing like that. You had, you know, just bizarre shot selections, stupid player behavior, sinner doing not what a sinner should do. Should we talk about the Christbineum?

Yes. I was building up to that. There was the infamous Jesus pose. Although this was not like the worst thing it did, because you'll see this kind of stuff in any kind of game, you know, it was the cherry on top of the Sunday. And there was a guy, I forgot his name. talking to him, but he was the one who had the original video about, you know, Biden standing out. Hard eight times. Hard eight times. Yes, hard eight times. That's right. Yes, very good.

Standing out at midcourt like effing Jesus. And they also did all these things with the controls. And you could hear people clicking on their controllers because like they moved the pass button. And I think they moved it to the trigger or something. And it's like, nobody does that. So this was a week before the thing was due to launch at the end of September 20. 2010 and EA Sports pulled it back. Just they said they were delaying it. And this, of course, has become a pattern. But they pulled it back and then canceled it outright.

But there were a few copies that did make it into the wild through distributors. And there's like one or two guys that I've talked to who did get a copy of NBA Elite 11. And so it was this crushing embarrassment because, oh, I forgot to mention in the earlier part of this narrative, Mike Wang left EA Canada and went back to visual concepts. And they put out NBA 2K11, which had the Jordan Challenge, which was that wonderful suite of reenacting Michael Jordan's greatest moments against the teams he played them with their rosters and all of the period piece settings and things. God, I remember that opening where they're coming down in the tunnel at Chicago Stadium. It was just fantastic. Blew it all out of water. And what Electronic Arts is left with is they made a poor decision to try to.

to remake an iterative title in a single year against probably the strongest competitor they have, and they've just never been able to recover from it. They decided to take a year off after this calamity. They didn't do anything in 2011. They did not announce anything for 2011. This was not anything that was in the works, and they were going to take two years to deal with it. They brought in a guy named Nick Vlodica as the producer, and he had done really good things with the Tiger Woods series, bringing in Augusta National and the Masters, they had a philosophy, if I'm remembering it,

they were trying to capitalize on the fact that NBA 2K is a very difficult game to play for people who have not played it for a very long time. It's difficult for me to play, because I don't have a lot of basketball sense as an individual. That's some great branding. This is really hard. Yeah, it's, I mean, I hate to say it, but, you know, I mean, I can, anybody can move in the lane and get around and create space and pass, but if, you're talking about doing the things that look, you know, here's the Euro step, you know, here's the jab step to a fake to whatever.

That's, you've really got to have like firsthand, you know, command of the control set. And the other thing, too, is that visual concepts would keep changing these things year after year after year. And they would get away with it because they didn't have anybody on the other side of the table who was like, hey, look, we're just as good and we're easier to play. And I think that was the direction they were going in. And some people kind of complained about it because they're like, you know, I don't want to have all my dunks or layups look or be contextual. I want to have some finite control over

that, blah, blah. I saw a preview. I went down to Florida and I talked with them about it. I probably drank a little bit too much of the Kool-Aid because, you know, I wanted to believe in this thing coming back and being, you know, nobody wants to see games canceled. Nobody wants to see them fail. That's stupid. What a silly thing to root for? But they had a really bad showing at E3, some really top smart guys in the know about video game basketball saw it behind closed doors presentation. And it was like, you've got to be kidding me. And it looked nothing like this demo that I had seen, which was a different build up in Portland at a private showing about a week before. And the 2K guys were laughing at me because I wrote this glowing preview.

And they're like, this thing looks like a joke. And they were right. So ultimately that was canceled. And we've been hearing all of this stuff about it was going to be a day. download title. You know, it's probably going to be play now mode, a career suite, not too well developed, but at least you could, you know, play a persistent career. And then on, excuse me, online multiplayer. And it was going to be a downloadable title. And it got canceled. And people got really mad because now it's like, okay, some people sort of were cynical about electronic

arts's decision when they said, we're canceling NBA Elite 11 because it doesn't, you know, to the level quality that we owe our fans and customers and whatever. And there are a lot of people who think that they would have pushed it out the door had the Jesus Bynum glitch, not being such an embarrassment. Count me among those. Right. And the other thing, too, is if you'll remember, they had the NBA Jam revival packaged with it.

Yeah. So they were really trying to get people hooked, you know, with all kinds of incentives other than NBA elite itself. and they had to scrap all of those plans and release NBA Jam, you know, on its own, which I'm sure was very painful for them to do. They did publish NBA Live 14, but it just didn't do enough. There were so many silly things that were wrong with it. It was impossible to get your shot timing right.

And it was variable for each player. And it, there was no real muscle memory to it, if I'm remembering. There was no practice mode. There was no tutorial such that you could get a feel for this game that had been off shells for three years and know what the heck you were doing. But they did get it out. It was reviewed very poorly. Fifteen came out and so did 16. So they did have a run of three. Now, 14, I'll have to point out, was only on PlayStation 4 and Xbox 1, which were the new consoles at the end of 2013. Now, 14 was the one that was marred by the like super bad facial scanning.

What was that? Well, now that, I have been hard on NBA law. Excuse me, NBA 2K about this. That was the one where I took this video and it ended up on Jimmy Kimmel and I'm swearing, although it's muted. I think actually the facial scanning app has been a lot better for NBA Live. It's just nobody plays NBA Live. And 2K finally got its head on straight and offloaded that to a mobile app, you know, a tablet or a phone instead of trying to do it through these cameras on the consoles, which nobody buys and they're all crap. But, you know, to bring it into present time. I think the sales, I've seen numbers that like in its first month last year, NBA Live 16, you know, did like 8,000 copies or something like that. And I guess that's

physical sales, but that's terrible, especially for something that's a fully licensed, you know, sports video game. And I think, I think EA sports has tried to keep this iron in the fire mostly, you know, through appearances. And I think they've wanted to keep it going because, you know, they have the ultimate team suite, which you've seen. in FIFA and you see it in hockey and you've seen it in Madden and hell. When they had the college football game, they even tried it for a year there too.

Because it's just an unlimited revenue stream when you have people, you know, collecting these virtual card packs and trying to build a, you know, powerhouse team. And I think they wanted to keep the door open for that. But what has happened since then is they've probably seen greater opportunity in mobile where the game has been for the mobile space,

you know, a good, solid performer. They also have less competition, especially against 2K sports, which has done mobile titles in the past, but they haven't been what people are looking for. They've been more too much like, hey, we're taking a console game and putting it on a tiny screen with no joysticks. And a lot of people aren't really digging that. So they had NBA Live for mobile launching at the beginning of the NBA season, which is

traditionally when these games come out, but it was only on mobile phones. And then they sold everybody this bill of goods about we are committed to coming out on consoles. And people are going, what, in, you know, at the All-Star break? I mean, how does that make any sense? So obviously it'd be better for everyone, I suppose, if there were two equally great games or two games that were worth playing. But it sounds like this is sort of a Darwinian thing. They've just made a series of terrible decisions and bad games. And this is what happens.

And that's capitalism. So what is the cost to the consumer? In theory, at least less variety should mean. less competition should mean less innovation. So are we seeing that? Has there been a price that we're paying yet? Because it seems like even if there is only one option a year, there's always one pretty good option. Well, that is true. I mean, I think that even though people go, well, there's, you know, there's only one game and there's no incentive to improve it. I mean, I think there's a creative incentive to improve it just because these guys are real high performers and take a lot

of pride in the work they do. But I can understand the mistrust there. But if you're talking about no innovation, this was kind of the thing that I mentioned in the column, and I think it was a really interesting side effect of it is, you know, 2K sports by virtue of doing what it was doing and not doing it with an exclusive license, which, again, as I've heard in the past, the NBA had considered that at one point and then decided, no, we'll, you know, we'll maintain a multiple licensing, you know, arrangement. And I guess that's because, I guess that was maybe a courtesy to EA sports, because if they'd gone exclusive, they would have to go exclusive to 2K sports. I mean, that just, I mean, at the point that they were considering it, it would be stupid.

But 2K sports, which is not as, or at least definitely back then, not as big of an operation. I mean, it might be as big an earner now because of all the revenue they have coming in with my career. But anyway, per capita, 2K sports was able to be the 800-pound gorilla without having to pay for it. And in my view, that created all of this opportunity for them to do these grand experiments, you know, like a story mode. I believe it's the first for any, you know, licensed sports video game. That was, it depends on what I think we're going back to NBA 2K-14 there, you know, and it was something for which they brought in Spike Lee of all people to direct. And the story had a few problems, but the star power and the appeal of it was undeniable.

You know, things like NBA's greatest, which is, it still boggles my mind that it's such a one-off thing because it had beautiful presentation. And it's something that people really would want to play with the updated controls, but it was only in NBA 2K, 2K12. I think that if visual concepts of 2K sports were a little more panicked by competitive pressure or the need to make money off of a premium license that they were paying, you would have seen the Jordan Challenge, you would have seen NBA's greatest broken out as DLC. And I guess what they did was they broke off from that and said, nope, we've got to try something else now. We're going to bring in Jay-Z as executive producer,

and now we're going to bring back the dream team. And so, you know, we don't have time to spend on these old things that we used to do. But these safe plays that were appealing, we have to try something else now. Now, on the other end of it, I think what's taking place is sports publishers are pushing in the direction of this sort of unlimited revenue opportunity through these ultimate team type modes of play. There's my career in NBA, which is huge. And I know that Take 2 Interactive, which is the parent company of 2K Sports, views it, you know, it's just as much of a moneymaker as Grand Theft Auto online. I'm not sure if you guys play that, but there's all kinds of virtual items that you can buy for real money, you know, out of that.

And then there's ultimate team, as we've mentioned with EA Sports. And then there's something called Diamond Dynasty, which is with Major League Baseball, MLB the show. Now, I don't play it that much. It is the same kind of model. When I'm spending real money in MLB the show, I'm buying virtual PEDs. I'm getting training points for my career player so that I can have a 98 mile an hour fastball on my rookie year. Just rubbing the cream and the clear all over your virtual body.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you should see my scalp, man. I look like King Griffey Jr. and the Simpsons. So I think that that's sort of where to try to put a little bit of a balm on it. I think that's where the variety is these days, or at least what a consumer should look to, which is if it feels like, you know, the usual offline play and an online multiplayer with other humans, you know, is the same year to year to year, we'll take a look at, you know, these other kind of fantasy sports modes that are doing things that try to crib off of, you know,

even the daily fantasy craze, if that's still around. You know, we're trying to get you interested in a team of players as opposed to a team of, you know, brands or colors or logos. And they're your players and they're your own players and you play them against people that you know. And it's a little more participatory. I think that a lot of older gamers, particularly around my generation, are a little mistrustful of that, mainly because it's, there's the expectation that you have to spend extra money on it. But they do, they do do some interesting things in their, you know, draft champions and Madden was a lot of fun. last year and when they introduced it and they've supported it still. And it's nice to go in and have that kind of variety of drafting a team and you're going to

play three games with it. And if you can pull off three victories, well, you'll get a nice little reward for elsewhere in the game. That, I think, is where the variety is coming from. The problem is it's internal to the games itself. It's not necessarily, you know, a separate game altogether. And for people who don't know, could you just kind of lay out the licensing costs that are associated with these franchises, especially with an exclusive license, just to convey how

high the barrier for entry is, if you are not the dominant publisher already? Well, there's several barriers to entry and the licenses and nobody, I mean, you could go and try to pull it apart from what the players associations report and the revenue that they have received. But that's to a players association and it's not to the league overall. So you don't, you're missing a significant portion of the picture. But I think, you know, I think the revenue to Madden, excuse me, to the NFLPA for Madden has been as high as like 20, 25 million in a year. But I think that there was something going on with helping them build up a war chest back when they were facing the work stoppage. It's not only the licensing costs, it's the development cost

because you're talking about iterative products that have been built up over now decades. And it's sort of a two-pronged problem because if it's impossible for any one, else to get into this game because it would take two and a half years to get the engine plus the scanning of all of the facilities plus the scanning of all of the relevant players and making that look nice because that's now more sophisticated, you know, plus getting your online multiplayer code right, plus here's how we do progression in a career mode and all this other nonsense. If it would take that long, you know, to do that from scratch, and again, this is when NBA live failed to recognize, even though it was on the previous console generation,

then how would the league decide to get a new partner if it wanted a new partner or if an old partner said, we're out of this, we can't make money off of it. Because I will point out that 2K sports had a terrible deal with Major League Baseball. It was essentially a rebound hookup after they lost NFL 2K. They overpaid for the Major League Baseball license. They lost $30 million a year on it or something like that and said see ya after 2013 and there has been no major league baseball video game on xbox one and absolutely no sign that anyone is ever going to come close to doing it i mean i think kanami would have had the engine to do it with their their japan league game but kanami is another story altogether i mean hell i think they want to make pachinko machines more

than video games no um so so again that's the conundrum that you get into. And that's, that's a, that is a, it's not just like if, if the league's all of a sudden said, oh my God, we have got to have a video game and, you know, it's a fire sale on our license and anybody who wants to come in can. There's still an enormous technical component on the back end that those are, are spiraling costs that a publisher would have to recoup. And, you know, if, again, the sales picture isn't there because kids are getting younger, they're playing Overwatch or League of Legends, or they're interested in Rocket League, you know, or any of these other wonderful alternatives that are out there, and they just go, eh, I play soccer at school, I play basketball at school, I don't need to do that at home, you know, that's a real problem.

It's not just as simple as the premium that people pay for an exclusive licensing. The biggest barrier is in all of the expectations that a sports video game faces because I remember I would review Madden. And one week when I was working for Kataku, I did like four component. reviews of Madden and it was a total of like 8,000 words. And so it was like four games and one. And Madden NFL, you know, 12 back then wasn't exactly a world beater of a game, but it really was like four games and one. So, you know, that's something that they have to spend a lot of money to meet the expectations that have built up, you know, in the 15 years preceding us now. And so lastly, there was some news this week. The NBA announced a partnership with Take 2 for

an official NBA 2K ESports League. And we don't know all the details yet, but did you have any initial reaction to what this might mean for sports games or sports? Well, I think we've seen professional teams here

and in Europe get into e-sports on an individual basis. I mean, and the stories that you guys have had mentioned that, but those are not sports video game titles. You know, those are things like Counter-Strike. These are things like League of Legends, where it's a lot easier to have a game that is balanced that it becomes in the end, it comes down to a player's skill and knowledge.

When you're playing a game that is based on professional sports, it opens up to me a real conundrum of how you balance the game, how you make it determinative, you know, how do you handicap it if you want, if somebody, you know, wants to play the cavaliers and the, in the the warriors, I mean, to use two good teams, you know, not an extreme matchup. You know, sports is so much about about matchups and about playing to strengths and then, you know, neutralizing your weaknesses. How do you give people two reasonably matched teams and have anything, have an interesting looking competition with a true outcome that isn't just, well, I picked the better team? I think this is something that that EA sports has run into.

They made a huge push that they announced at E3 last year for an e-sports league. And they've been committed to it. But it has gotten nowhere near the attention of, again, the ongoing things like, you know, Dota 2, the international, you know, like, you know, the call of duty in the e-sports league that's the arrangement they have going there with Turner, for example. So just because the league is putting its muscle behind this, which is a good thing, doesn't necessarily mean that they've got a product that. a lot of people are tuning into right now because it's it again, it's a question of what am I looking at? Do I understand what I'm looking at? And is it an interesting game to me or is it just, well, you know, of course somebody's going to win when one guy takes the 76ers and the other guy takes,

you know, the San Antonio Spurs. So I think they've got it, they have to solve that kind of a structure. And then I'll get interested in it. It could be like the breakthrough that sports needs in esports. I think people have seen it as kind of a natural inclusion in e-sports and have been like, well, why doesn't it play more of a role? And then you sort of look inside of it and you go, okay, now I get it.

And there's all sorts of people who want to make their money off of it. Obviously, if you've got licensed teams that are in it. But the bigger picture, though, is I think it's very smart of the NBA to go into this on a league-wide basis. It's certainly a growth area in terms of attention

and money, you know, fandom and things like that. And it's probably, you know, I think Adam Silver probably made the decision with his advisors that it was best to go into this collectively rather than have individual clubs do it, you know, as a shrewd move. And then when the time comes that the entire league is sort of booted up for this, you've got a really imbalanced posture, you know, presence. And then there are some teams that are not worth watching.

And then there are only two teams that people do watch. So I think going into it on a collective basis is probably a smart idea. All right. Well, you can find Owen on Twitter at Owen Good. You can read his writing at Polygon. Owen, thanks a lot. Thanks very much for having me, guys. Okay, closing thought for today. Activision's CEO said on a sales call, he admitted that Infinite Warfare's sales underperformed and that the sci-fi setting didn't resonate.

And so they're going back to the classic setting in the game that's coming out this fall, presumably a world war of some sort. And I just want to say that it. resonated with me. You can all go back to the Battle of the Bulge or wherever you want. You can replay the same battles. We've played over and over again. I will be strolling the moon of Europa where I was meant to be. That is my call of duty. Yes. Okay, Isaac Asimov. Listen, as I've said numerous times, when you go to infinite warfare, where do you go from there? It's true. You can't, there's nowhere. How do you follow that? You can't go anywhere from there. Any other kind of warfare is finite by necessity.

By necessity, it will not be infinite enough. They really wrote themselves into a corner. They did. They did. All right. So that will do it for this week. We will talk to you next Friday. All right.

The special relationship is still alive. Two in our two nations. Just about. We're keeping it alive. Just us right here That's it Just us right here right now Unfortunately you may be very angry

Not fair Yeah.