Operation Sports Forums - View Single Post - If NBA Live Has a Future, It Has to Look Radically Different

ianlast · 12-09-2013, 03:15 PM

The NBA Live story is one of the more fascinating tales of self-sabotage in sports gaming history.

Allowing Mike Wang to leave their studio and having David Littman produce their next title (Elite 11) has to rank as one of the most colossal blunders EA has ever made. At this point, I would chalk it up to a corporate decision that saw the sales numbers without any sort of context, the context being that Live's product quality was for once on the upswing, and that the sales numbers were a simple reflection of Live needing to gradually rebuild goodwill with consumers.

I'd love to hire some of these EA bigwigs to build me a backyard pool, boy oh boy are they good at digging themselves deeper. Chris makes an extremely good point in the article; to paraphrase in my own words, had Live 14 been nothing more than a 1080p port of Live 10 with updated rosters, courts and uniforms, that would have represented a solid first step for Live's revival. Instead, the series is just further circling the drain by releasing this broken, unfinished product. Absolutely inexcusable when they had a perfectly functional and enjoyable product three years ago. Smh.

12-09-2013, 03:15 PM	#111
ianlast Rookie OVR: 10 Join Date: Mar 2008 Blog Entries: 1	The NBA Live story is one of the more fascinating tales of self-sabotage in sports gaming history. Allowing Mike Wang to leave their studio and having David Littman produce their next title (Elite 11) has to rank as one of the most colossal blunders EA has ever made. At this point, I would chalk it up to a corporate decision that saw the sales numbers without any sort of context, the context being that Live's product quality was for once on the upswing, and that the sales numbers were a simple reflection of Live needing to gradually rebuild goodwill with consumers. I'd love to hire some of these EA bigwigs to build me a backyard pool, boy oh boy are they good at digging themselves deeper. Chris makes an extremely good point in the article; to paraphrase in my own words, had Live 14 been nothing more than a 1080p port of Live 10 with updated rosters, courts and uniforms, that would have represented a solid first step for Live's revival. Instead, the series is just further circling the drain by releasing this broken, unfinished product. Absolutely inexcusable when they had a perfectly functional and enjoyable product three years ago. Smh.