Few game genres lead players to spend more time on menu screens than sports games. The menus are where a lot of people have the most fun as they reconstruct rosters, create custom players, or create chaos with rule changes. The playing space is merely the playground for what takes place in the menus. The people who play sports games like this are also the ones who typically choose to mute the soundtrack of the game. After hearing the same songs constantly it becomes grating and they’d rather deal with silence than listen to the same tracks over and over again.
That is among one of the many reasons that pushed the NBA 2K series to begin expanding its library of songs. From 30 songs to over 100, NBA 2K has been making an effort to change how people feel a sports soundtrack should sound. However, their efforts at creating a soundtrack isn’t just expanding the list of songs and calling it a day. They know how many people put hundreds of hours into 2K all over the world, with many of those spent on menu screens and wandering The Neighborhood, which provides an opportunity. That is an audience they can expose to new music and a lot of their efforts with the last couple of 2K games, including the upcoming NBA 2K22, has been introducing lesser-known artists to their games. From up-and-comers to international stars, 2K wants their game to be a place where someone can discover their next favorite artist.
“We really wanted to shift the focus to being a platform for music discovery.” David Kelley, soundtrack curator for NBA 2K22 said to Uproxx. “And along with that looking to introduce not only new and up-and-coming artists from the US. But also around the world really kind of turn an eye towards the global soundtrack, the game is global and our audience is growing globally. So we really wanted to kind of focus on not only up-and-coming artists, but artists you may never have heard before, artists that [are] new and exciting and fresh for our community but also from the international community as well and really going global with the soundtrack.”
2K’s goal of going global and staying fresh with the soundtrack is very different from how the average sports game chooses to approach its soundtracks. The biggest sports titles in the world typically focus on bringing in established names and songs that people will be familiar with. There isn’t really anything wrong with this approach, because sticking to what’s known will cover the widest net of players, but in the modern age, it doesn’t bring anything to the player that they can’t do on their own. Most players have the ability to check out a top 40 or find trending artists on their own. They can also just play their own playlists through headphones, their phone, or over their speakers. Video games are always about adapting across the board and that’s what 2K wants to do with how it’s handling the soundtrack.
“There’s a huge community, a huge audience, [and we] wanted to engage people where they’re at.” said Kelley. “Instead of spoon feeding them things that are easy to find. You open Spotify [and] there’s 40 songs immediately in your attention that they want you to listen to. We want to try to take our curation a step beyond that, and a step further, and really get into those realms where we think our community would be interested in.”
Of course, it’s one thing to say that your goal is to offer new music to your fans, but it’s another to act on it. Beyond that, the process of getting people to actually listen to that music, is a whole different thing altogether. The way 2K is going about putting this new music in front of their players is actually the same solution to another problem sports games have — constant content updates.
Sports games are notorious for being a $60-$70 game that is played for a month, put down, and then never picked up again. Sure the hardcore players will play all the way until the next game, but the large majority will eventually fall off. The only way to keep these people coming back is to consistently have something new to check out. A new game mode, roster updates, or events where they can get new gear for their player. So why not have something like that with music too? 2K20 and 2K21 featured a constantly updating soundtrack, but now that 2K is introducing “First Friday’s” for when those updates are pushed through, it turns it into an event players feel worthy of tuning in for.
“Now, we’re really trying to engage in a conversation in real-time with our community about. Here’s the music. You were going to be hearing from us,” Kelley said. “What should we be hearing from you? [The] contest that we did last year and the year before that was specifically, reaching out to our community to have them send us music really engaging in an [engagement] effort on the part of the NBA 2K to find new artists from our community that we can put on our soundtrack…We’re really looking to rather than leverage prestige big name artists, you know, as a pure marketing piece, the soundtrack for us really becomes a discussion with our community and really kind of an engagement piece about, who are you listening to? Who should we be putting on and then who do we think they should be listening to and putting on?”
So many companies talk about their community, how much they care about it, and how much they want to do for it. Those comments from developers are always genuine because it really is the community of these games that pushes developers forward with their work, but it’s rare to find times where the community can directly talk back to the developers and actually have an impact on what is going into the game. When that happens it creates a bond with the game where the players feel like they’re a part of it. A lot of the 2K community can see their own fingers on the soundtrack of the franchise, which is a cool experience that not many games offer, and creating unique experiences like that is why players keep coming back every year.