Could NHL 2K Go The Way of College Hoops?

2K Sports has generally supported their more prominent titles with at least a patch and a handful of roster updates throughout the year. NBA 2K9 has already received a significant patch and effort has been made to provide more roster updates than in the past. On the other hand the lesser-regarded 2K titles have gone largely ignored post-release, one recent example being Prizefighter which did not receive a patch.

News comes now that there will be no patch for NHL 2K9 and to date there hasn’t even been a single roster update. While the game showed improvement with the studio move to Visual Concepts that hasn’t resulted in better post-ship support.

Last year just a few weeks before 2K canceled College Hoops I had an article about how the sales for college basketball games didn’t seem to be able to support two titles. While their MLB and NBA franchises are completely safe in this regard, NHL would appear to be in a similar situation. The market for hockey games is relatively small and this year EA Sports’ NHL 09 captured a large majority of those sales.

With Take Two struggling financially it once again becomes a question of whether the license and development costs support producing the game based on potential sales. The absense of support for the game following its release could potentially be a sign it is on the way to being cut. Even if the series continues the low level of support and concern isn’t very encouraging.