The NBA is poised to announce a partnership with Take-Two Interactive Software, the makers of the popular NBA 2K video games, according to reports from Sam Amick of USA Today and Zach Lowe of ESPN.com. The two companies will work to launch a professional eSports league in 2018, which will feature competition between professional NBA 2K players.
According to both Amick and Lowe, the NBA 2K eLeague will eventually feature 30 teams, one owned by each of the NBA’s 30 franchises. Those teams, made up of five human players apiece, will compete in a season that mirrors the real NBA season. While all 30 NBA franchises may not be ready to launch their own eSports teams by 2018, commissioner Adam Silver hopes that at least half of the league’s franchises will have teams for the first year of the eLeague.
“These are a completely different set of professional athletes,” Silver told Amick. “There’s a global pool of gamers. They come in all ages, and sizes and ethnicities and sexes, and then we will at some point have a draft that will look somewhat similar to an NBA draft, in which the teams will select their players, and presumably on top of that they’ll have the ability to spot some great talent on their own, players who aren’t identified through sort of a league system. And that’s how we’ll form our teams.”
According to Lowe, specifics on the schedule, structure, and salary cap of the NBA 2K eLeague remain “hazy,” but players are expected to compete using their own user-created avatars, with no real NBA players represented on screen. Gamers who play in the league will receive salaries and will “essentially treat the NBA 2K eLeague as full-time jobs during the season,” per Lowe. Meanwhile, the league will hold events, sell tickets, and even negotiate licensing rights so that fans can watch games remotely.
“Fans and players of these games, who aren’t as expert as these professionals, want to come into an arena and watch the very best play,” Silver told Amick. “So you can imagine a scenario where, (say) the new arena in Milwaukee, where there’s five-on-five competition, just like NBA basketball, (and) it’s being projected on a huge, large high-definition screen, and fans are watching all the moves. There’s quarters, there’s halftimes, and everything that goes with it.”
As Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explained to Amick, the eSports industry already has a significant consumer base, and is still on the rise, so the NBA and Take-Two are confident that the new NBA 2K eLeague has significant potential as a moneymaker.
“We fully believe that it will be well over a billion dollars as a market in the near future,” Zelnick said of competitive gaming. “Of [a] 250 million person audience worldwide, about half that audience – about 125 million people – are avid consumers of competitive gaming. They watch competitive gaming events, largely online. And this is nascent. It’s just beginning.”