EA SPORTS’ NBA Live 13 Cancelled Two Years After NBA Elite 11 Was Also Cancelled

That cackling sound you  hear is coming from the folks at 2K Sports who have to be as surprised as anybody that EA SPORTS has cancelled the ill-fated and mildly anticipated five-on-five basketball sim NBA Live 13. The timing isn't really surprising since much of the press had been denied access to the game throughout the summer and the thing was believed to be due on store shelves sometime in October --which is when NBA 2K13 and most hoop titles like to show up to capitalize on the excitement around the upcoming NBA season. You can't launch a game that nobody has seen in working condition.

Andrew Wilson, the executive in charge of EA SPORTS who now has as many NBA sim cancellations on his resume as his predecessor Peter Moore, did the honors on the official website for the game:

I'm disappointed that we have not yet met our high expectations with NBA LIVE, but I remain motivated about where we're going. We're committed to delivering new innovation in online, and our progress in the visual presentation of the game continues to take big strides.

This is unprecedented. NBA Elite 11 was cancelled at roughly the same point in it's life back in 2010 and back then EA SPORTS said many of the same things they're saying now. How can a studio waste all of those development man-hours, all of that good will with the NBA and NBA Players association and the hopes and expectations of fans just so that studio can turn around and DO THE EXACT SAME THING two years later with the same mysterious circumstances swirling around it? Somebody let me know if you can make sense of this. Right about now the NBA is thrilled to have the 2K Sports sim as its main piece of video game merchandise because clearly the league can't count on NBA games from EA SPORTS anymore.

As a side note, I'm one of the few people to actually have a copy of NBA Elite 11 still lying around under some old scrapbooking magazines and believe me that game would've frustrated the hell out of consumers with its wonky controls. NBA Live 13? No idea what was wrong with that game because it was never really in working condition to evaluate that I saw.