Rumor: NHL 2K11 likely canceled, 2K Sports in trouble?

2K Sports sure seems to be struggling right now. In the wake of Thursday’s announcement that parent company Take-Two expects to post a loss of $137.9 million this year — which is largely the fault of poor performance from 2K Sports’ baseball games — comes a rumor that the next installment in the publisher’s hockey series, NHL 2K11, may have been axed.

Yesterday, Pastapadre noticed that NHL 2K11 was nowhere to be found on Take-Two’s Q4 fiscal 2009 results in the section of games that the publisher is currently planning to ship in 2010. (Both MLB 2K10 and NBA 2K11 are listed on the report.) Chris Littman at The Sporting News’ FirstCuts blog asked 2K Sports for comment, and this is what a PR rep told him:

We are currently in the process of evaluating our sports portfolio and have not announced any new NHL titles at this time.

That’s a damning statement if I’ve ever seen one. Littman pointed out that if NHL 2K is no more, the franchise appears to be dying the same death as the publisher’s College Hoops 2K series. After College Hoops 2K8 released in November 2007, the company remained quiet on the future of the franchise before announcing in January 2008 that it had ended negotiations with the Collegiate Licensing Company (which, as you may have guessed, controls licensing for college sports) and would not be making any more College Hoops games.

Hit the jump for some more thoughts on what this could mean for 2K Sports.

This is not an entirely shocking prospect for 2K Sports, whose NHL 2K games have been badly outsold in the past two years by EA Sports’ celebrated hockey titles. Competition in the simulation sports genre is very tough, to be sure: NHL 2K9 and 2K10 weren’t bad games, by most accounts, but it just so happened that NHL 09 and NHL 10 were better. If it turns out that this is, indeed, the end of NHL 2K, then I’m sad for all the folks at developer Visual Concepts who may soon be out of work.

I also worry for the future of 2K Sports as a publisher. Their existence seems like it’s being increasingly marginalized on all fronts:

• the MLB 2K games that have come out since Take-Two bid reportedly $40 million for an exclusive third-party development license — MLB 2K6, 2K7, 2K8, and 2K9 — have been poor, to say the least, compared to Sony’s spectacular MLB The Show series (especially the last two years);
• EA’s recent hockey games have just been better than 2K’s;
• thanks to EA’s exclusive NFL license, the company can’t even make a football videogame.

Only their highly acclaimed NBA 2K franchise remains a dependable success, and even that was challenged by a solid effort from EA this year in NBA Live 10. And with Take-Two’s recently stated preference to put out easily marketable titles for hardcore gamers (“the safest place to be is in triple-A,” said CEO Strauss Zelnick) — games like BioShock 2 and Max Payne 3 — I wonder if the company will continue to bother (or can afford to continue bothering) trying to compete in the sports game market, or at least in any sport other than basketball.

What do you guys think?

[Via Pastapadre, FirstCuts, and GameSpot]