2K Sports has stealthily added a note to its NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 and WWE 2K Battlegrounds eShop pages announcing that both games will be delisted at the end of this month.
As spotted by DelistedGames.com, the publisher announced that you only have until 20th February to pick up a digital copy of either game before it leaves the storefront for good. The games' online servers will be sticking around until 9th July, when they, too, will be shutdown — "After that time, all game functions requiring online servers will no longer function," the note reads.
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Now, both games do have a certain amount of single-player content available, so you'll still be able to play through these modes offline after the cutoff date. That said, as pointed out by VGC, a lot of 2K's in-game unlockables are frequently tied to its online servers, thanks to the reliance on real-money transactions, so there's every chance that new character and cosmetic unlocks in both games will also wrap up with the server closure.
While both Playgrounds and Battlegrounds each have a physical release, bypassing the delisting somewhat, it's still a shame to see them taken down from the eShop (and all other digital storefronts, it seems).
We had a great time with Playgrounds 2 when it arrived on Switch way back in 2018, calling it "a bright and empowering way to defy gravity like Air Jordan himself" in our review. Things weren't so bright for WWE Battlegrounds on Switch, which we critiqued for its "limited and repetitive combat, dopey AI, an excessively locked roster and a series of bewildering design choices that really should have been questioned at some point during production" — yikes.