NBA 2K League chief: Global scale will be key to making money in esports

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
October 1, 2018
Updated June 20, 2025
10 min

The inaugural season of the NBA 2K League was a success by most measures. When it culminated in August, the esports series had more than 152 million video views across all social media platforms, and the league’s 17 teams had more than 1.8 million combined followers.

It helps that this video game esport has an analog in the real world, with established fans for the NBA franchises that compete both on the real hardwood and the virtual court. That makes the game more accessible than a lot of other esports, according to Brendan Donohue, the managing director of the NBA 2K League.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.