But would it be as bad if there were two competing games?
I'm not sure that it actually would.
Fifa isn't exactly in a great place even though they have a solid competitor.
I've played the past four 2k basketball games quite a bit and they're riddled with their own problems. All sorts of server issues/lag problems, in-game glitches, save file corruption problems, broken gameplay mechanics, and I'm sure there's more that I'm missing.
On top of all the issues it's monetized like it's a f2p game... The build system 2k uses for park/pro-am/rec is one of the biggest scams in all of gaming. You basically have to drop $50 on VC to upgrade your player to usable level if you don't want to get steamrolled online. That's $50 for
each build you want to make too. So if you want a guard and a big man then you're looking at $100... Did you mess up something on your build that you want to edit like your height or weight? Well you're shit out of luck and have to make a brand new build from scratch. You can literally wake up one day and load up the game just to find out your build that you dropped money into has been nerfed too lol...
The guy running the show over there (Strauss Zelnick) is one of the biggest scumbags in the videogame industry whose only goal is to monetize their properties to the max they can. They've honestly probably just looked at the numbers NHL does and figure it's not worth their time.