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EA's Riccitiello On NBA Elite 11's Cancellation
EA Sports' NBA Elite 11 was supposed to be a new take on the sport, with dual-stick controls and a revamped career mode. A disastrous, glitch-filled demo proved to be the death of the project, with EA ultimately shelving it just before the game was set to launch. Now EA's CEO John Riccitiello has talked candidly about the decision, explaining why he made the call and what it means for the future.
"I thought about it and I thought, alright, at that point I didn't know how good [rival game NBA 2K11] would be but the rumors were [that it was going to be] good," he told Kotaku in an interview. "So we could have shipped a product we weren't proud of dead against their game that they are proud of and that we would have been proud of to ship ourselves. We would have probably lost 5-1 in the marketplace against that and firmly cemented a reputation for being one to ship secondary sports titles. We could have put the game back in production and showed up back in time for, say, the All-Star Break…but when you look at the data, typically somewhere between 85 and 90% of basketball games ship between launch date and the All-Star game so we would have been competing for, what, half of the last 10%? And the knock-on effect would have been that the team that would otherwise have been working on the following year's product would have three fewer months to build it.
"So there's the table: You can ship a product you're not proud of and compete for marginal share. You can delay the game to get a better product, but that's going to have a knock-on effect. And we made what I judged to be the best call given the circumstances."
It was certainly not a decision that anyone took lightly, but it's encouraging that it happened. Too often, we all gripe about games being pushed to market before they're ready. Seeing something like this canceled – particularly a game with with this high of a profile – shows that publishers know that players have long memories.
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