Introduction

Virtual Currencies in Games

NBA 2K

Utility tokens are a fairly new and innovative asset class. In difference to stocks, where the value highly depends on the performance of the company invested in, the utility token gains value depending on its usage. Whether it is just used as the fuel of a platform or has several use cases across different platforms and products, the price should highly correlate with its number of users. However, in the past we have mostly seen the downside of the utility token in the cryptocurrency market, with major price declines due to no usage and no adoption. With not many successful utility tokens in the market, it is difficult to estimate the potential market cap of utility tokens with adoption. However, outside of the cryptocurrency market, the gaming industry has successfully integrated virtual currencies into their products in recent years, giving us a glimpse of how successful utility tokens could be. In this article, I will take a look at two successful in-game currencies to see, how their financial data ranks among other cryptocurrencies.Virtual currencies in games are a relatively new mechanism and have been introduced as part of the “Freemium” model. Freemium is a business model where users can play the basic features of a game for free but advanced features or the purchase of in-game items requires payments. After some Freemium titles revealed the potential revenue generated with virtual currencies, major video game publishers also started to integrate virtual currencies into their products. While in some games purchasable items can just be used to change the appearance of an avatar, in-game currencies have seen tremendous interest in games, where the purchasable items can give a gamer a competitive edge over other gamers. This is especially the case in sports games, where gamers can buy better players for their team with the help of virtual currencies.One of these sports games with a purchasable in-game currency is the NBA 2K series. Video game publisher Take-Two has introduced virtual currencies in NBA 2K13 and they have seen tremendous interest ever since. While Take-Two already called the sales of virtual currencies in NBA 2K13 “high-margin revenue”, sales of virtual currencies in the NBA 2K series grew by an incredible rate of 150% in both 2014 and 2015 and by about 70% in both 2016 and 2017. Growth in 2018 has slowed down a bit but is still at a high-flying 34%.Unfortunately, Take-Two doesn’t disclose the total revenue generated with virtual currency sales in NBA 2K publicly, however, they have named the increases in revenue generated by the NBA 2K series in fiscal year 2017 (265.8 million USD) and 2018 (159.4 million USD). Valuing these numbers against the increases in copies sold and the percentage increase of revenue with virtual currencies enables us to estimate the increase in revenue with virtual currencies in NBA 2K for the fiscal years 2013 to 2018, which can be seen in the following graphic. Don’t take these numbers as an exact value (it is just an estimation) but they should be good enough to give us a hint of how much revenue Take-Two is generating with virtual currency sales in the NBA 2K series.