Monday Tip-Off: NBA 2K Playgrounds 2’s Nasty Surprise

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with a few thoughts on a nasty surprise that greeted me when I fired up NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 recently.

I’ve been critical of NBA Playgrounds and its sequel NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 over the years. Look, call me a snob if you want, but I still consider the best NBA Jam titles to be the gold standard when it comes to NBA-oriented arcade basketball video games, with NBA Street being the benchmark for the streetball-style releases. As games that attempted to be a mash-up of NBA Jam and NBA Street with a few original ideas sprinkled in, the NBA Playgrounds games fell short of the series that inspired them. From gameplay to roster management, they’re a poor man’s Jam crossed with Street.

At the same time, I have had fun with them, and came to appreciate both a little more after revisiting them in recent years. They’re not fantastic and I’m not a fan of the loot box mechanics or the grinding, but they’re solid and have their moments on the virtual blacktop. I even ended up playing through a season in NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 a while back. To that end, after searching for a game to play while getting some cardio in on my exercise bike, I decided to dust it off again. Unfortunately, I was confronted by a nasty surprise upon firing up the game for the first since 2023! Frankly, it proved that NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 was even more poorly designed than I previously thought.

The reason I hadn’t played NBA 2K Playground 2 since 2023 is because not long after my last session with it, my old desktop gave up the ghost; right before Dee and I were set to record an episode of the NLSC Podcast, in fact! I ultimately got a new desktop and after reinstalling the essentials and games that I’d be playing most often, I added the rest of my library here and there. NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 has been installed on my new rig since early 2024, but I haven’t felt inclined to pick it up again until recently. When I booted it up, I was greeted by the EULA, which did concern me. Take-Two infamously changed their policy last year though, so I figured that’s all that it was.

Oh, was I ever wrong! After agreeing to the EULA and proceeding to the main menu, I found myself opening packs, as if it was my first time playing the game. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. My worst fears were confirmed when I finally arrived at the main menu and viewed my collection. Every card that I’d collected was now gone! All of the progress I’d made levelling up players…gone. The save file for the second season that I’d started…well, you get the idea. This isn’t the first time that I’ve lost updates or saved data, and as I’ve previously discussed, it’s unfortunately been self-inflicted. It stings this time though, as it wasn’t my choice to reinstall, and the servers are still up.

Now, I do make a point of backing up everything I can when it comes to my game collection, including my Steam data folder. Indeed, this is how I was able to get the final official updates back in place when I reinstalled the NBA 2K titles that no longer have online support, as the sync.bin files were safely on my backup drive. As it turns out though, the data for NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 is stored elsewhere. While I suppose I could be blamed for not ensuring that I was backing up the appropriate folders and files for the game, the more pressing issue is that none of this progress was stored in Steam’s cloud, or on the game’s servers. That data shouldn’t only be stored locally!

After all, NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 features microtransactions, as you can buy Golden Bucks to obtain packs containing players, clothing items, and court customisation parts. In fact, the cosmetic items come in packs that are exclusively purchased with that premium currency, which naturally accumulates very slowly to “encourage” us to buy it. And yes, this is obviously optional, but since the option is there, some people definitely will! The problem is that if the game needs to be reinstalled, you can end up losing content that you’ve paid for. I won’t mince words here: that is utterly shameful, and a disgracefully bush league move by both Saber Interactive and Take-Two alike.

Naturally, I Googled the issue, just in case there was an easy fix that I’d overlooked. Sadly, a thread on the Steam forums confirmed that this was a known issue that has been observed as far back as 2019. Like me, the person who started the thread had bought a new PC and reinstalled the game, only to discover that all of their progress had been reset. One of the replies mentioned spending money on the game, which had now well and truly gone to waste. The suggested solution was to get in touch with 2K Support, which – if you’ll forgive my snark here – basically confirms that there’s no solution. Oh, you can start over again, but I really don’t feel encouraged to do so!

I mean, I can obviously avoid this issue going forward by backing up the appropriate local folder. That would prevent a repeat of this nasty surprise when I do eventually replace my current desktop, or if I have to reinstall NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 for some other reason. At least, I’d hope so. The nagging thought that I could still lose all of my progress doesn’t help with feeling motivated to start over! Of course, even if there’s no danger of that as long as I back up the necessary files, I’m still not that keen to begin again from scratch. I like NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 enough to want to pick it up where I left off, but not enough to grind to obtain those players again and fully upgrade them.

Funnily enough, this isn’t an issue with the original NBA Playgrounds, which does use Steam’s cloud backup. That’s fortunate, though I had far more progress to lose in NBA 2K Playgrounds 2. Thankfully I didn’t pump any extra money into the game, but others clearly did, and the fact that they can lose content that was obtained through microtransactions is a major issue. It shouldn’t be so easy to lose that data regardless, but it’s inexcusably sloppy design to the point of feeling like a scam when it involves currency and items that are purchased through recurrent revenue mechanics! That data really needs to be backed up via the Steam cloud, or stored on the game’s servers.

It’s one thing to have gameplay that doesn’t live up to the hype, especially if the game is still decent as NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 is. It’s bad enough to force so much grinding into the game by having us assemble the roster through loot box mechanics (or a paid unlock), and then level up each player to their maximum abilities. I’m going to push back on a Steam review that scolded gamers for “complaining” about this (there’s that word again!). It was a questionable design choice, and we were right to push back on it, particularly since it turns out that we can lose that progress. There’s no defending or excusing the lack of cloud saves and server-side failsafes to avoid this nasty surprise.

I’m not sure what to blame here: incompetence or greedy malice. In a duel between Hanlon’s razor and Grey’s law, and taking into account some of Take-Two’s practices and some of the flops from Saber Interactive, I could go either way. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter I suppose; the outcome is the same. And yes, I’m late to the party here, but having had no need to reinstall NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 until years later, it was a nasty surprise. The fact that the issue was identified back in 2019 – and possibly even earlier, as the game came out in 2018 – and no fix was ever developed for it, is an indictment of the quality of the post-release support. Of course, this isn’t a surprise.

Back in 2019, I wrote that the partnership between Saber Interactive and Take-Two ended up putting the 2K into NBA Playgrounds. Not just in its name, though it did indeed result in an incredibly clunky title. As I noted, while it facilitated the addition of Legends such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, it also brought some of the worst aspects of NBA 2K to Saber’s game: microtransactions, grinding, and a lack of fairness in the loot box mechanics. Despite pre-release hype about the series having long-term potential, content dried up in about a year. It’s no surprise that a once-thriving Facebook group for the game has become a ghost town.

Honestly, all these years later, part of me still wonders if Take-Two brought NBA Playgrounds under its umbrella to squash it. It’s not as though major video game companies don’t do that; just look at EA! I remember feeling put-off when Saber CEO Matthew Karch met with 2K suits to show them the first game and promise they were doing something different that wasn’t trying to compete with NBA 2K. It felt like 2K was demanding that Saber bend the knee when they and any other studio have every right to develop an NBA video game, if they can secure the license. It opened the door for a collaboration that had benefits, but also drawbacks. Now, the series is dormant.

Of course, looking at some of Saber Interactive’s other games – the reboot of Shaq Fu comes to mind – it could just be that they weren’t able to follow up on some of their ambitious plans to keep updating NBA 2K Playgrounds 2, or simply didn’t have the experience or foresight to properly handle a PC game with microtransactions and loot boxes (though that’s still not a great excuse). Again, it ultimately amounts to the same thing. On top of its design flaws and gameplay shortcomings, NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 has a nasty surprise in store if you didn’t back up the necessary local files before you reinstall it. It’s one thing to be a pale imitation of a better game, but that’s just shoddy.

I won’t say that I’ll never play NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 ever again. It’s good enough to at least consider doing so, and as long as I back up the appropriate files, I presumably won’t lose my progress again. I’m not in any rush though, and I’m glad that I didn’t spend any extra money on the PC version! I did purchase the roster unlock DLC on PlayStation 4, and both it and my data are intact thanks to the PlayStation Plus cloud backup, but again, it was a nasty surprise to lose all of that progress on PC. If Saber Interactive ever makes another basketball game – and I’m not exactly keen to see that happen, to be honest – then they need to do a much better job with it across the board.

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