NBA Live 13 Gets Canceled

This wasn’t supposed to be NBA Elite all over again. With the extra year off, EA was supposed to return to basketball glory with NBA Live 13. Heck, NBA was even planning on making the offer sweeter by making it a cheaper downloadable game. So much for all of that, as EA just announced that NBA Live 13 has been officially canceled.

On one hand, I applaud EA’s commitment to quality. It is a bold move to now can two fully-produced games before launch, which must have cost them millions of dollars. However, it can’t be good for business to not have a basketball offering three years in a row, as your competitor is owning all of the market share with the best (and only) product in the category. Would it make more business sense to at least have something on the shelf to get any sort of return on investment? Or is the EA Sports brand worth scrapping three years, and two basketball games for?

If EA still has plans to come back in 2013, they’ve only dug themselves an even larger hole than where they were. I’m really curious to see if EA can ever return to glory on this front, or if they’ve damaged their basketball offering for good.