Folks, it’s March Madness, and the rumor mill remains nonexistent when it comes to college basketball video games. That’s a bummer. But the real bummer is it feels like we’re not even on the precipice of that changing either — at least not yet.
Let’s wind the clocks back a year (errr 15 years, actually), and remind everyone that a lawsuit did not end college basketball video games, bad business did. At least, that’s what 2K Sports and EA Sports more or less called out for why they both stopped making college basketball video games. Remember, NCAA Football 14 was the last college football game, which was four years after the last college basketball game from EA. Lawsuits ended college football video games, not college basketball video games.
So if a lack of profits was why college basketball video games ended, then what’s really changed since then? On its surface, it seems not a lot of a good things have changed since then. College football is still far and away more popular than college basketball, even if March Madness absolutely consumes us for a month out of the year, and video games have only become more expensive to make.
In other words, it doesn’t seem like there’s a great selling point to bring back a full-on college basketball game right now when looking at the basic fundamentals. However, the landscape of both college sports and video game basketball has changed since 2009. EA has all but given up on NBA Live, NBA 2K continues to sell well but is not the critical darling it once was, and college athletes can now be paid.
It wouldn’t surprise me if EA (and 2K probably) are waiting to see how EA Sports College Football 2025 does commercially (and if there’s any legal fallout somewhere) to reassess college sports video games, and that makes sense. But in either case, both major sports studios (or maybe an unknown newcomer) do have reasons to think about college basketball video games again.
2K Sports And College Hoops 2K
The more obvious one here is 2K Sports because, well, they already have a successful basketball game. College basketball is in a weirder spot now than it was when College Hoops 2K8 came out as more of the athletes are foregoing college basketball for the G League or overseas, and the game is more international than ever so many of the best NBA players never even played basketball in the USA before joining the league. To put it another way, the star power of college basketball is down.
But we have seen college basketball in NBA 2K since then. It’s been part of the journey of your player within the MyCareer mode, and it’s been something that mods and users have reincorporated through various methods to keep the idea of college basketball alive.
The other thing that has happened since then is the integration of WNBA into the NBA 2K franchise. The WNBA gameplay is arguably better than the “normal” gameplay, and 2K has also done a fine job giving people different ways to use this new license. Costs being what they are for video game development (let alone licensing) make me believe this aspect is truly the more important selling point for a future 2K college basketball experience. I don’t think we would see a “full” College Hoops 2K release, rather it would be its own sub-section of NBA 2K — or at least hopefully some sort of March Madness mode.
On top of that, 2K needs a win. MyEras was a big deal last year, but it didn’t halt the critical downturn the series has been going through. Regardless of the sales, NBA 2K was the critical darling of sports games for many years, so one way to reverse the downturn is incorporating features that excite a large group of people. Bringing back the pageantry of college basketball and putting it in the game in a novel way would arguably be the best way to do that.
EA Sports And NCAA Basketball
If EA Sports College Football 2025 is successful, I have a hard time believing EA would not at least consider its other options once again. As of right now, they’re the ones dodging the landmines as they push to get out a college video game, and so they’ll be the most prepared to do it again (if they want).
That said, NCAA Basketball 10 was the last time we saw this series, and things did not go great. After all, EA Sports probably in part stuck around because NBA Live was struggling and 2K had dropped out of the college basketball scene. EA probably felt there was a “win” to be had there at the time, and it seemingly did not work out. Now here we are in 2024 and the same parameters exist in terms of 2K not being in the college basketball space and NBA Live not being a thing either. Would EA take the chance again considering they failed the last time they tried this out with the same circumstances in place?
It’s also fair to say 2K Sports was outshining EA Sports on both the NBA and college hardwood back in the day, but it’s not fair to say EA never had good ideas either with its basketball games. NCAA Basketball 10 is probably most fondly remembered for some of the broadcast flourishes, but if you go back some years, SecretBase‘s Kofie Yeboah points out one of the great ideas EA did have at one point with its playcalling system in March Madness.
I don’t have much to say about this playcalling feature beyond trying to remind folks that EA is capable of doing some smart things with its basketball games, even if both NBA Live and NCAA College Basketball ended up falling woefully short on the gameplay front over the long haul. Since NBA Live seems all but an afterthought at this point, maybe the play really is a smaller-scale college basketball game to test things out.
In either case, college basketball and basketball video games in general deserve another shot here. We lament our lack of options these days with sports video games, and we’re met with the reasoning being licensing and development costs versus the amount of copies sold. If that’s the case then fair enough, but the desire for college sports is not going to vanish, and so it’s on game companies to figure out new ways to deliver these college sports video games. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of staring at Fry and then ignoring the request.
