Basketball fans have just received a blow to the gut, as EA has officially announced that the highly anticipated NBA Elite 11 has been canceled, after delaying it a few weeks ago from its scheduled release date in October.
EA's basketball franchise has been going through a rough patch lately, so the decision to replace NBA Live with a whole new series, NBA Elite, was made.
NBA Elite 11 was scheduled to appear in October, but a last minute announcement from EA Sports revealed that the game was pushed back to an undetermined time due to quality issues.
The extra development time would mean that the team at EA Canada, in Vancouver, had a chance to solve all of the glitches and problems.
Sadly, it seems that it was just a wasted effort, as NBA Elite 11 has been officially canceled, a fact announced by EA's Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown during a conference call yesterday.
According to EA's Chief Operating Officer, John Schappert, further development of the NBA Elite franchise will be handled by the EA Tiburon team in Orlando, the same one behind EA's successful Madden NFL franchise.
The move of the basketball franchise
was already rumored last week when EA admitted that it had made a few layoffs at EA Canada.
The company will still deliver a high definition basketball game this year, in the form of
NBA Jam, which, after being released for the Nintendo Wii last month, will appear as a standalone product, on a disc, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 17.
Until the decision to delay NBA Elite 11 was made, NBA Jam for high definition consoles was scheduled to be included as a digital download, in order to spur the sales of the new game.
The previous delay was rumored to have
cost EA around $60 million, so this decision to cancel the game entirely will certainly result in a lot of profit being lost, and a lot being gained by 2K Games, which released its own basketball simulator, NBA 2K11 on time.
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