WWE 2K25’s The Island Is a Slippery Slope Into Microtransaction Hell

WWE 2K25 just launched, and all things considered, it’s arguably the best sports entertainment video game in the past decade. Just about every facet is fun to play, allowing you to interact with the world of the WWE any way you want. The creative freedom Visual Concepts gives players, from its impressive creation suite to its customizable Universe mode, is incredible. However, there is one specific mode that hinders this game from truly being one of the greatest wrestling games of all time: The Island.

The Island is a brand-new mode in the WWE 2K series that lets you create a wrestler as they compete for Roman Reigns‘ favor and a WWE contract in a digital representation of the Island of Relevancy. There are essentially two unrelated sides to this mode. The single-player component gives you the chance to run through brief quest lines with some known faces and heels of the WWE. The multiplayer component is essentially an online ranked mode where you’ll climb tiers like other competitive games like League of Legends or Street Fighter 6.

Let’s start with where The Island excels. It is genuinely fun to walk around the Island of Relevancy the first time around. It’s like walking around a WWE theme park, with fun little references to the company’s history spread throughout the map. Like the rest of the modes in WWE 2K25, you can tell wrestling fans made this map. I also think the episodic formula to its story portion is smart, as it gives you a reason to go back to The Island in the future.

Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end. Maybe I would be more accepting of a mode like this if I had never played NBA 2K25. 2K’s professional basketball simulator has a similar mode called MyCareer where you can create a player and use them in a variety of modes. You can play through your character’s backstory, begin your career in the NBA, or compete online in 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 games. All of this is centralized in an interactive hub world called The City.

On paper, this mode is great. This is going to sound sarcastic, but I promise it is not. I genuinely love creating a terrible rookie power forward and rising in the ranks in the NBA to become one of the greatest players in history. I don’t interact with the online component as much, but giving you the ability to enter The City with friends and compete in ranked basketball games also seems like a great time. The other quests, like playing through your character’s backstory, aren’t amazing, but they’re nice additions to break up the grind of playing a full NBA season. In practice, however, The City is a microtransaction cesspool filled with too many opportunities for 2K to squeeze copious amounts of money out of its users.

It should be noted that all of these microtransactions in NBA 2K25 are optional. You do not need to spend real-world money to buy VC bundles to play the game. But if you want to compete online in any meaningful way, you kind of have to.

In NBA 2K25, your created player’s stats can be upgraded using its in-game virtual currency called VC. This currency can be earned by playing any mode featured in MyCareer. However, the earnings are pretty low, and at a certain point, it costs quite a bit to upgrade a stat to just one point. As mentioned above, this in-game currency can be bought using real money, and there are users out there who take the easy route and just buy their way to the top. There isn’t anything wrong with that. It’s their money to waste.

RELATED: WWE 2K25: How Much Real Money Do You Need to Fully Upgrade a Created Wrestler?

However, what makes this slimy from a gameplay perspective is that these stats carry over to every mode in The City, including multiplayer. The game essentially becomes “pay-to-win,” giving those who decide to spend that cash easy wins, especially during launch time. What makes this even worse is how much it costs to upgrade your character. Just to get from 60 (your starting overall score) to 85 is around 180,000 VC. Since VC packs come in set amounts, you would have to spend $49.99 for the 200,000 VC pack. To get into the 90s, you would easily be spending $99.99 for the 450,000 VC pack as it’s the only pack that would have enough VC to hit an overall that would be “competitive” online.

Beyond that, there are the constant collaborations and limited cosmetic drops that can have players easily dropping $50 for a 200,000 VC pack just to look “cool” on the court. Then there is the Season Pass, which takes literal days to get through, albeit I did it through its card-collecting MyTeam mode. It took me over 60 hours to finish the pass, and that was with the “Hall of Fame” pass, which gives a 15% XP booster for the duration of the season, 10 level skips, and 15,000 VC for $19.99.

I guess what I’m trying to say is NBA 2K25 is a great game marred by a flawed system. Its microtransactions are egregious, and a shining example of why gamers hate the very mention of in-game purchases.

So, how does this affect WWE 2K25? Looking at NBA 2K25‘s The City is like peering into the potential future of The Island, or whatever it’ll be called in future iterations. As it stands now, it’s a stripped-down version of The City, almost like Visual Concepts is testing the waters to see how players would react to the mode. You don’t have to spend $99.99 to max out your wrestler’s overall quickly… you have to spend $49.99. Adopting that pay-to-win model is disheartening, and imagining a timeline where it’s spread throughout most of the game like its NBA counterpart is worrisome.

The Island is potentially a slippery slope into microtransaction hell for the series. I’m not saying there isn’t a future where WWE 2K26 and beyond has a version of the mode worth playing. But with 2K’s track record with NBA 2K, it’s hard to believe.