The latest NBA 2K game always gets a huge Steam discount in May, and this year is no exception

pcgamer.com:

NBA 2K23 isn't a high point for the basketball series by many accounts—it hasn't helped its Steam user review average that we got the last-gen version—but I was still a little taken aback to see it on sale for $9.59(opens in new tab) as part of Steam Sports Fest. That's an 84% price cut well under a year after release.

It turns out that this is normal for 2K's NBA series. Price history data from SteamDB(opens in new tab) shows that NBA 2K22 and NBA 2K21 were also discounted by 84% on Steam just eight months after they came out. The games always release in September, which puts their big discounts in May, and it doesn't take Alan Turing to crack this code: 2K cuts the price of its latest NBA game during the NBA playoffs. (It took a little longer for NBA 2K20 to get its 84% discount, which probably has something to do with the season being suspended that year.)

2K doesn't do this with its other sports series. WWE 2K23 just came out in March, so I wouldn't expect a huge discount (it's 25% off(opens in new tab)), but the year-old WWE 2K22 has never been discounted by more than 75%, and it took 10 months before that happened. The seven-month-old PGA Tour 2K23 is a respectable 67% off during this Steam sale, but that ain't 84%.

For years, we've observed that PC gamers can save a lot of money by waiting a relatively short amount of time before buying new games. In 2017, we reported that big-budget games were, on average, discounted by 50% within seven months of release. Annual sports games are particularly great targets for savings since their publishers want to sell as many copies as they can before pushing the new version each year. That doesn't explain why 2K's basketball series gets the deepest mid-year cut out of them, but