Take-Two Admits It Has No Plans to Let NBA 2K VC Carry Over

Unsealed court testimony has confirmed what many NBA 2K players long suspected: Take-Two Interactive has no intention of allowing Virtual Currency to transfer between annual releases of the basketball franchise, and company representatives say they do not want to build the infrastructure that would make it possible.

A Fresh Start by Design

According to Insider Gaming, testimony from Michael O’Dwyer, vice president of product management at NBA 2K, argues that blocking VC carryover is a deliberate design choice intended to level the playing field. O’Dwyer’s statement, as reported through Game File journalist Stephen Totilo, frames the policy as a matter of fairness: every player, whether a returning veteran of the franchise or a first-time buyer, should enter a new release with identical opportunity and no inherited advantage. The company holds that carrying currency forward would undermine that principle from day one.

Beyond philosophy, 2K’s representatives acknowledged that building such a system would be a significant engineering undertaking. The company would need to separate VC that players earned through gameplay from VC purchased with real money, then create a transfer mechanism that works accurately across separate annual titles. Take-Two says that effort would pull development time and resources away from other priorities, and that the player benefit does not justify the cost.

Lawsuit Exposes Extensive Player Tracking

The testimony surfaced as part of a lawsuit filed in 2023 by a minor identified as “J.A.” and his mother, which asks whether Take-Two carries legal responsibility over how minors interact with VC inside its games. Court filings reported by Insider Gaming show the company collects detailed session data, including which game modes a player accessed, how many matches were played, how many minutes were logged per day, and full purchase and spending histories tied to Virtual Currency.

Despite that depth of data collection, Take-Two says it does not track player ages and therefore cannot identify whether someone purchasing VC is a minor. In one unsealed spreadsheet, the company had recorded J.A.’s daily activity across NBA 2K20, broken down by mode, and tracked his per-day playtime in minutes in NBA 2K21, alongside his transaction history.

Take-Two also pushed back against the plaintiff directly in its legal filing, noting that J.A. continued playing NBA 2K titles after the lawsuit was filed, including three entries released after the case began. The company argued that playing under its terms of service constitutes consent to those terms and undermines the claim that VC was misappropriated.

What It Means for Players

The disclosures put a clear corporate rationale on record for a practice that generates recurring revenue each time a new NBA 2K title launches. Players who spend money on VC in one year begin the next with nothing, regardless of how much they previously invested. With Take-Two stating on record that it views VC carryover as both technically costly and philosophically undesirable, there is little reason to expect that policy to change in future releases. The lawsuit remains ongoing, and further details may emerge as proceedings continue.

Sources: Insider Gaming