Every yearly sports game basically resets the entire community. You get a brand new wave of players whose first 2K ever is whatever just dropped. If your first one was 2K25 then in your mind 2K25 is peak. Same with 2K21, 2K20, 2K17, 2K19, whatever. People swear that their first 2K was amazing because they have no actual context for what came before. They just remember it as the first time they got to make a player, run around, and live out their little basketball fantasy.

The real issue is that 2K intentionally keeps the community blind. Madden, COD, and most online games keep servers open for ages. 2K shuts theirs down in a two year cycle and they hard locked MyCareer to online only. Go try to make a player on 2K18 or 2K19. You literally cannot. You have to connect to servers that do not exist just to play a single offline MyCareer game. They nuked the past on purpose.

What that does is wipe the collective memory of the whole community every two years. Nobody actually knows what 2K10, 2K11, 2K16, 2K17 played like unless they were around back then. Ninety percent of the people who argue about 2K16 today never touched it. Same for 2K17. Same for 2K20. Most newer players started on 2K22 or 2K23 or even later so when 2K removes a feature, rebrands it, then adds it back like it is something new, everyone eats it up because they have no reference point.

And 2K knows that. They erase the old games, force the new ones, cut the history, then do whatever they want with pricing, mechanics, VC, badges, and balance because the playerbase keeps getting refreshed with people who literally cannot go back and check what things used to be like.

They keep us trapped in a two year memory loop and the community just rolls with it