NBA 2K25 has an unusually firm retirement age for basketball players: two years.
On 31 December, 2K will shut down the game’s servers. From the following day, MyCAREER, the mode where you create a player and take him through an NBA career, will no longer be available. MyTEAM goes too, along with multiplayer and everything else that needs 2K’s servers. Offline modes including Play Now and MyNBA will remain.
The game itself is only two years old. It launched on 6 September 2024.
And NBA 2K25 did not always sell like something you might reasonably expect to lose pieces of in 28 months.
The standard edition cost $69.99. The All-Star Edition was $99.99 and included 100,000 units of Virtual Currency, or VC, the money NBA 2K uses for everything from clothes to improving your created player. Above that sat the limited Hall of Fame Edition at $149.99. That included the All-Star package, some additional MyCAREER material, a season pass and a 12-month NBA League Pass subscription.
So no, 2K was not charging $150 simply for a basketball game and a digital man whose career would soon be repossessed. Part of that price paid for a year of actual NBA broadcasts.
The digital man is still worth discussing.
A career you can spend money on
MyCAREER is one of NBA 2K’s biggest attractions. You create a player, choose the kind of basketball player you want him to become, join an NBA team and start improving him. The same character also enters The City, NBA 2K25’s online social hub, where players meet, shop and play against each other.
At launch, 2K described MyCAREER in appropriately grand terms. Players could pursue superstardom, chase MVP awards, win championships and build ‘the next great NBA dynasty’. Progress also fed into seasonal rewards.
Improvement also has a shortcut.
VC can be earned by playing, but it can also be bought with real money. Among its uses is raising the attributes of your MyCAREER player.
Nobody has to buy it. That distinction matters. A sufficiently patient player can improve through play, and VC is used elsewhere in NBA 2K25 too. Buying 100,000 VC does not mean depositing 100,000 units directly into one man's jump shot.
The game's economy nevertheless makes spending tempting enough that it became one of the main criticisms at launch.
GameSpot's Mark Delaney tried playing without spending the 100,000 VC included with his review copy. His newly created player began with an overall rating of 60. Within 48 hours, Delaney gave up and used the currency, writing that playing with the weaker character was simply not much fun. He described NBA 2K25 as an excellent basketball game damaged by a system that encouraged players to pay to become competitive.
Operations Sports found much the same pressure. Earning enough VC through ordinary play to improve a character substantially took considerable time, while buying it could raise those attributes immediately.
This is where the shutdown becomes more interesting than the usual disappearance of multiplayer servers.
A player can spend months developing one character. They can spend money speeding that development up. They can take him through NBA seasons and into The City. NBA 2K25 explicitly encourages the idea of building a career and a dynasty around him.
On New Year's Day, none of that character's remaining career will be accessible.
His contract negotiations have gone poorly.
2K did warn buyers
2K has a strong answer to part of this criticism.
NBA 2K25 was never sold with a promise that its online services would operate forever. Its store information warned that online features could be changed or terminated, and MyCAREER has always depended on an internet connection. This is not a newly discovered trapdoor beneath a mode everybody was told would work offline forever.
Nor is NBA 2K25 being rendered useless.
2K says owners will still be able to download the game after it disappears from digital shops on 30 October. Play Now survives. So do MyNBA, The W and MyWNBA. If what you want is basketball against the computer or a franchise to manage, there is still a game there on 1 January.
And none of this is unprecedented for the series. NBA 2K24 and earlier games have already gone through the same process. 2K's own support page says discontinued entries lose MyCAREER and MyTEAM while their offline modes remain.
That makes the practice predictable.
It does not make the combination any less remarkable.
2K has built a mode around attachment to one player, attached paid currency and seasonal progression to the experience, and then given the whole thing a lifespan closer to a phone contract than an NBA career.
The server dependency is not some unrelated technical inconvenience arriving years later. It is part of how the mode works. The City needs other players. Competitive games need servers. Seasons need a live service. The economy works across that connected structure.
The machinery that lets 2K keep selling things around your player is also the machinery that eventually takes your player away.
The next player is already waiting
The timing makes the annual sports-game economics unusually easy to see.
NBA 2K25 will stop being sold on 30 October. NBA 2K27 has already been out since 4 September.
The new game has MyCAREER too. It has a new City. It has another created-player story. The $99.99 Deluxe Edition came with 100,000 VC and MyCAREER bonuses. For a brief period around launch, there was again a $149.99 version, this time called the Ultra Edition, with 135,000 VC in total plus additional passes and digital extras.
You can see the handover without needing to infer very much.
Build a player. Improve him. Buy things for him if you want. Spend a couple of NBA seasons with him. The next NBA 2K arrives, followed by another. Eventually the server goes off.
Annual sports games have always asked players to abandon old teams for new rosters. Yesterday's squads become obsolete. Licences change. The new season arrives and suddenly last year's perfectly serviceable basketball has developed a smell.
MyCAREER asks for a different sort of investment. The whole point is that this one is yours.
That makes preservation harder than simply leaving an old exhibition mode intact. MyCAREER reaches into online systems and The City, and separating the solo career from everything around it may not be trivial. 2K has not announced an offline conversion.
But that technical architecture was chosen by 2K, not by the person who bought the game.
There are alternatives a publisher could design towards: a stripped-down offline version, a way to export the character into a permanent local career, or some final conversion before the servers close. None has been announced for NBA 2K25.
Instead, the player remains tied to the service until the service ends.
All of this is wonderfully inappropriate for a mode built around sporting immortality. NBA 2K25 invited you to pass legends, collect trophies and build a dynasty. Its own marketing talked about putting championship banners in the rafters.
You can still play NBA 2K25 next year.
You just cannot visit the bloke whose banner was supposed to hang there.
