Dang. So it won’t have a career mode or recruiting or anything? That sucks. I’ve never really done that and was wanting to this time.
Nah. That’s outdated news. It is true that 2K will be slow-rolling the games. They’re a little more involved with carefully building player-characters with accurate signature moves and animations. EA hasn’t made a really good basketball game since the 1990s and I don’t know anyone who heavily plays college basketball games regularly that wants them within a million miles of a simulation basketball product. 2K has micro-transactions…true. So does EA, even more infamously and notoriously to the point of causing legal boundaries to be set up around some of the stuff.
EA was willing to rush out a basketball products with all the teams, but it would have been hot garbage. Their games are terrible for being unbalanced and lacking the intricacies that cause player A to feel distinctly separate from player B.
What 2K will do is they will create a basketball game that has about a quarter of the Division I teams in year one, as a stand-alone game. Then, in year two, they will expand that year over year until they have every team.
What howits was referring to has already happened. A lot of early speculation was that 2K would be adding college teams as a DLC to NBA 2K. When they unveiled it, it wasn’t a DLC. NBA 2K26 added college players, teams and assets to MyTeam, which is the gacha mode that was being referenced. That is separate than the standalone college basketball game that is coming.
I am a gamer (or at least I was until my job that currently has me away from home for 15 hours a day.) I can definitely tell you — serious sports gamers wanted 2K. That’s why many of the colleges refused to work with EA and signed with Take Two (parent company for 2K.)