2K Games

2K Games

The "2K"' in the name stands for how much their microtransactions will cost you.

Founded:	January 25, 2005
Founder:	Take-Two Interactive
Headquarters:	Novato, California, United States
Key people:	David Ismailer (president) Phil Dixon (COO) Melissa Bell (SVP, head of global marketing)
Parent:	Take-Two Interactive
Subsidiaries:	2K Vegas 2K Chengdu 31st Union Cat Daddy Games Cloud Chamber Firaxis Games Hangar 13 Visual Concept
Website:	https://www.2k.com

2K Games, Inc. is an American game publisher that was founded on January 25, 2005. Located in Novato, California.

2K was founded under Take-Two Interactive in January 2005 through the 2K Games and 2K Sports labels, following Take-Two Interactive's acquisition of Visual Concepts that same month. The company serves as one of Take-Two Interactive's two publishing labels, the other being Rockstar Games.

Why They Suck Now

NOTE: Many of these reasons and actions can be attributed to excessive executive meddling on Take-Two's part.

Many of their recent sports games are loaded with microtransactions and lootboxes and heavily rely on pay-to-win mechanics.
They are trying to persuade gamers in Belgium into getting lootboxes unbanned from games in the country. They were even desperate enough to ask Belgian gamers to ask the government to change gambling laws.
Their sports games are heavily recycled each year, making them feel very copy pasted. They also tend to be buggy and barely functional.
They bribed various game review websites to give their sports games high scores despite their numerous issues. When a game review site called The Sixth Axis gave the game a 3/10, they tried to pressure the website into altering the score.
Even some time ago, they published poorly received games such as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Duke Nukem Forever, and WWE 2K20.
They forced an update for Civilization V that includes a new launcher that displays ads for Civilization VI, and there are many reports of people who can't play the game properly or at all due to the launcher selecting the wrong version of DirectX when booting the game. On top of that, the update has also been reported to contain potential security vulnerabilities.
They recently added unskippable advertisements in NBA 2K19, a $60 AAA game.
Their trailer for NBA2K20 was one of the most transparent and shameless instances of AAA publishers advertising that their games have gambling mechanics in them.
- 2K continues to claim that loot boxes are not gambling despite their own trailer literally advertising gambling and Casino mechanics.
Their WWE games (2K14 - 2K18), had their 2K servers shutdown, meaning you cannot download community content anymore.

Redeeming Qualities

They are responsible for publishing great games such as the BioShock the Borderlands series, various Sid Meier's Civilization games, and more.
They used to release very good WWE games (Except WWE 2K15, and up until WWE 2K20), and that many fans thanked 2K in making the WWE games after the bankruptcy of THQ.
Unlike Rockstar Games, They support the Nintendo Switch by porting most of their games to the console. Even if that port of WWE 2K18 had negative reception, including WWE 2K Battlegrounds. And when come to think of it, 2K and Nintendo have a much better partnership.