Commodity Fetishism Is Law in NBA 2K26

By Jackson Tyler | September 5, 2025 | 11:55am

Video Games Features nba 2k26

In the very first chapter of Das Kapital, before he talks about Surplus-Value, Capital or even exchange itself, Marx finds it necessary to discuss Commodity Fetishism. This is a particularly confusing concept as its academic and casual definition have drifted over the centuries and yet it is crucial to understanding not just the psychological imposition of capitalist society upon its subjects, but far more importantly, NBA 2K.

Commodity Fetishism is not, as you may assume, an obsession with material things or even money itself. As Marx says (p. 53), “so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond;” a diamond is just a rock until it is mined, cut, and sold on the market. Yet when you walk into a jewelry store, the diamond is there all the same, and it costs what it costs. It appears to possess value arbitrarily in and of itself, not from the chain of nature and labor that brought it to the store. Commodity Fetishism is the mental process by which that chain is made invisible. What does this have to do with basketball? In NBA 2K26, a successful assist is worth 0.0016 cents.

MyCareer is the premiere mode of NBA 2K, taking the form of a persistent basketball MMO that nonetheless (in a deal every other live service publisher would commit actual, real-life atrocities for) gets to erase its players progress and purchases while charging the full price of an AAA game every fall. To play it is to subject yourself to a form of mental tinnitus—a constant buzzing in the skull, a flicker just out of sight, a permanent inability to fully focus your vision. When discussing microtransactions in video games it is often through the lens of whether they are fair, whether the player needs to spend money or is provided enough resources through play to engage with the game’s systems. 15 minutes with NBA 2K reveal the flaw in that approach. Yes, 500 VC per daily quest is a pitiful, insulting reward, but far more compromising is to play a digital basketball game, look at your XP bar, and know instantly that your victory over the Spurs earned you precisely 41 cents.

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Time is, as we all know, money. And yet what separates labor from play and art is that your time playing a video game at home is not a commodity in the way that your time at your office is. NBA 2K inverts this phenomenon more openly and precisely than any other video game on the market. It is often said that keeping up with a live service game feels “like a job,” indicating that far from being cutting criticism this is a basic fact of modern gaming that everyone is on some level aware of. But where many live games obfuscate this relation with multiple interlocking currencies and systems for the player to decipher, NBA 2K is almost proudly honest with how totalizing VC is as its chosen value-form. A Streetball match earns you a third of an upgrade point. A Daily Quest is worth a fifth of a single body warmer. An online Go Kart race (this is a basketball sim) gets you a tenth of a shoe, but only if you win.

2K and Visual Concepts have turned “let’s play some hoops!” into a world in which commodity fetishism is law. Things simply possess value arbitrarily, and these values can be changed at whim and with no explanation by its creators. You can describe this in many ways—a rip-off, a scam, whatever—but it is also: a really bad RPG.

NBA 2K26

By structuring its game design such that the logic of capital is as natural as air, 2K does not merely exploit its audience; it molds them as capitalists in its own image. NBA 2K turns its customers into competitors. To progress your stats, buy a t-shirt or even change your in-game celebrations you become a card counter at the blackjack table, looking for the most efficient ways to gain VC with the hope of exploiting some flaw in the system’s design before they patch it out and the arms race continues. Maybe you search for the best ways to gain VC and find a recently uploaded youtube video; the thumbnail has that MrBeast sheen where it isn’t AI but looks like it anyway, the youtuber has a weirdly low sub count but the video is still sponsored by a sports betting service. Of course, why should you expect anything else?

In the narrative of NBA 2K26, your MyPlayer is a content creator. He’s vlogging to no one in high school running shooting drills, and he’s streaming to millions when he reaches the NBA and discusses his rookie season’s content strategy with his team. He pours his NBA money into business ventures that cement his brand, jokes happily with the Gatorade representative outside the official Gatorade Gym receiving his official Gatorade Weekly Workout. He wants to play in the NBA, falters in high school and struggles through the risky choice to play in Europe rather than college, eventually being drafted in the second round. But he made it. Because he never stopped believing.

NBA 2K26’s core fantasy blurs the line between becoming a professional basketball player and becoming a famous influencer, because of course those lines are blurred in real life. Everyone is their own brand, and everyone likes to be successful, so brands are good. Yet it rings hollow as there is no opportunity for true failure; you cannot get cut from your team. Your business ventures can’t fail because it turns out no one cares about the Nets Point Guard making an anime about himself. You can only keep believing. Keep trying. Keep winning.

Let us assume for a moment that NBA 2K26 is not just an expertly crafted value extraction operation imposed upon the day-to-day life of a casual basketball fan, but instead a holistic work of art. What then is its central theme? Narratively it tells a story of hard work and perseverance, pure American dream bootstraps, and total unquestioned reverence for the symbols of capitalist success—this is a game where Gatorade Brand Deals are presented as aspirational fantasy. Mechanically it is an exhausting and demotivating grind but one where true failure is impossible; you can only opt out of 2K’s regime of daily challenges and seasonal FOMO. And yet all of that can be skipped if you simply dip into your non-diagetic wallet and from outside of the game’s closed system simply conjure for your MyPlayer the resources needed to outspend the competition and render the daily grind obsolete.

At first blush this seems incoherent, the left hand and the right saying different things because that is what makes the most money. But upon closer inspection nothing could be further from the truth. NBA 2K’s naked exploitation, its interminable grind and its explicit pay-to-win design do not contradict its aspirations as a digital competitive sport. It is somehow exactly the opposite. They mirror perfectly not only the uneven financial terrain on which American professional sport is played but even the false-consciousness nature of sporting narratives themselves. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I quoted Moneyball earlier in this review and this was no accident: Moneyball is inarguably the defining sports movie of the 21st century, and it is one in which a heroic GM is a plucky underdog fighting against the threatening forces of his own baseball coaches (lol). When the A’s win more than they are ever supposed to win it doesn’t just feel good, it feels like an injustice is being corrected, like they got one over on the man. So too it is in NBA 2K. It feels good to beat a 90 overall an hour after the servers go live. It feels good to beat someone in MyTeam who has all the best cards. It feels good to watch the Angels sweep the Dodgers.

This is, just as with the grind, reflected in the content industry around the game. It isn’t just youtube hustlers trying to sell shovels in a gold rush, but one of the most popular forms of NBA 2K content is the No Money Spent challenge. This would not be such an enticing narrative if the game was not as exploitatively designed as it is. The depths of the game’s naked manipulation in pursuit of your money give meaning to your refusal to spend it. 2K tried to get you, and they lost. And all you had to do to beat them was buy their game and play it for 200 hours.

Because there is, though it might have slipped your mind until now, a basketball video game attached to this rent-seeking catastrophe, and you might find yourself wondering, reading this video game review, is it any good? To that I can only say that if all trace and memory of NBA 2K were to be wiped from existence and you sat people down and had them play, for the first time, NBA 2K26, it would probably be instantly declared the greatest video game ever made.

The core basketball mechanics of NBA 2K must serve simultaneously as the foundation for an authentic simulation mode, a single player RPG, a synergy heavy roster management gacha game, and a competitively viable multiplayer experience. That the mechanics are largely able to do so is testament to the undeniable talent of the developers that have passed through Visual Concepts over the decades. It is a monumental achievement that becomes invisible as they sell this game at full price every year. Each release brings different friction points with different segments of the playerbase. This year’s gameplay changes have a focus on empowerment and player control; players change direction faster, animations jerk and jitter as moments of stiffness that once preserved the polished visual presentation have been eliminated in favour of more immediate response to inputs on the stick.

Nowhere, however, is this philosophy more present than in the game’s headline mechanical change: Green-Or-Miss.

Simply, Green-Or-Miss is the fabled elimination of RNG in shooting. If you time your shot correctly, it will go in. No more games lost on dice rolls, the competitive integrity of the game is now absolute. A missed shot, a blown game, a failed quest: all of these cost the player VC, and as such players somewhat understandably demand to eliminate risk, to know that everything is under their control. Its implementation into the launch version of 2K26 is smart and satisfying, with the green zone dynamically adjusting as you shoot to the coverage of your defender. It is a mechanic that makes sense in the hand and simply feels good. It is also inevitably going to be an unmitigated disaster that kills the game, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop this. Among the higher skilled it will essentially turn every player into Steph Curry on his best day and render playmaking and defense and all the pesky “playing basketball” essentially irrelevant. It is a disaster for those looking for a more sim-focused franchise mode experience, who value player selection, conditioning, matchups etc. It is something the series has very rarely done, a dramatic mechanical change in the core basketball simulation itself that is laser-targeted at one section of the audience (high-skilled MyCareer PVP) and threatens to tip the boat over entirely.

But fundamentally this battle is unwinnable. 2K is too many things to too many people, and they already neglect the modes that aren’t directly monetized enough. Franchise Mode still suffers from its seemingly satisfying complexity being undermined by lack of polish and disastrously bad AI. None of the fun and varied MyTeam game modes can be played in a non-gacha environment. There are lines still in the commentary bank that I have been hearing for at least a decade. There is a masterpiece buried inside NBA 2K26, just as there was a masterpiece somewhere inside 2K25, 2K24 and so on, and every year it becomes harder to see it through the fog.

At this point, 13 years after the introduction of VC into the franchise, the quality of the game’s mechanical base is no longer a selling point, but a tragedy. It is almost impossible to quantify the scale of talent required to create a basketball sim that is simultaneously this lovingly detailed and instantly accessible, and its place in the final product is neither the carrot nor the stick, but the string. NBA 2K26 is a scam so honest and open it tells its players to scam it right back and maybe go online and scam each other. And after all, why shouldn’t they? When you turn off the PS5 and change the channel you might just hear Kevin Harlan reading the over/under live on air.

Jackson Tyler is an nb critic and podcaster at Abnormal Mapping. They’re always tweeting at @headfallsoff.