NBA 2K19 Having In-game Ads? My Thoughts On This

It has come to my attention that a game developed by Visual Concepts and released by 2K Games and 2K Sports called NBA 2K19 or 2019, that it has ads in which are sometimes unskippable in it, which occur in-between online matches. I discovered this when I was crawling down the rabbit hole of YouTube. And as a gamer, I have to voice out my thoughts on this. I really find this an unfair and unethical practice done by the game publishers on to its consumers.

Why is it unfair?

For the fact of being that the game is for sale and has a price tag on it. By pre-order date, you could pre-order the game for $60 or $100 for the anniversary edition. The price itself says a lot, but now adding unskippable ads to the game when playing online, is unfair to the consumer because they are under the impression that they have purchased a "full product".

Why is it an unethical practice?

Understanding ethics is the acknowledgment of what is right and what is wrong. So, for example, let's compare NBA 2K19 to broadcasting TV channels. You pay a monthly service fee to your "Cable" company so that you get access to the TV channels. So these TV channels create a product which is the content that you see. The content could be news, cartoons, movies, sitcoms, etc. Therefore these TV channels can put ads in order to receive an income from the advertisers. Whereas in NBA 2K19 you fully pay for the product but advertisements are present which is a wrong thing to do to your customers.

In Hindsight...

Based on the image above; what I can say is that the game on Steam is discounted by 84% which really absurd to me because the game now is priced under $10 and the anniversary edition is roughly around $12 as I speak. What I see from this is that for a game that has been released for 10 months from tomorrow is the game did not meet their expected game copy sales goals, so, therefore, it's management had to come up with a plan so that the publishers can achieve their profit goals for the game; by putting ads. The lowering of the price of the game was also to create demand for the product. What else I can see from this that, the game publishers are more or less more dependent on its online play because from the image above no discounts were made for its in-game currency. The user can also turn off this feature, whereby you will not see ads during online play.

In conclusion, that's all I can say about this issue because I do not own the game but hearing this though, was somewhat shocking because it was my first time ever hearing that a console game has ads in it. Feel free to subscribe to the blog, to get email notifications whenever I post. I will be really grateful for that. If you have different opinions about this or have something to add on, please feel free to comment down below. This is a safe space. 

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