NewNews - NBA Elite 11 Canceled

So Electronic Arts (EA) decided to cancel the game, but not the franchise.  This bit of news is everywhere:

Gamasutra - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31320/EA_NBA_Elite_11_Canceled_Personnel_Restructuring_Relatively_Small.php
Joystiq - http://www.joystiq.com/2010/11/02/nba-elite-11-canceled-series-handed-off-to-ea-tiburon/
Kotaku - http://kotaku.com/5679899/nba-elite-11-is-officially-dead
(Source of Image: http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sports/nbalive11/index.html?tag=result%3Btitle%3B1)

I'm not bothered by the announcement since I generally don't buy sports games.  The sports genre comes out with a new installment faster than a woman can pop out babies (not a bad thing), so it is difficult to keep up with any of them unless it's the ONLY type of game you play (Source: Youtube User - lfcMoorzey).  But what draws my curiosity is the direction Electronic Art's business is going.  With the release of Medal of Honor, the sales went better than "EA had expected".  With about 2 Million units sold so far, you would think that EA's market worth would go up.  It went up a little, but fell back down again along with NBA Elite 11 getting canceled.  Development did not meet expectation and "needed more time" in working out the bugs and gameplay.  Well, the franchise will be continued by a different team within EA.  The new NBA Jam came out and got positive reviews, did that not help the company?  I plan on doing a review of the game tomorrow if possible as I've gotten enough time with the game to determine the pros and cons.  I actually like basketball and often played on a weekly basis before I stopped, but I never got into watching basketball and playing it on videogames.  If I'm at a friend's house and they had it (which I do, NBA 2K9) I'd play a few rounds with him, but I wouldn't go out and buy the game.  If the market wasn't saturated with the same games in such short times, I might take interest in buying it.  It becomes overwhelming in a span of one year having, for example say Rock Band, three to five releases with new content but potentially the same game.  I'm not saying it is a bad game, but it does make it more difficult to choose which ones to buy if not all (I bought NBA Jam because of this reason, I haven't played one since the Super NES days).  This is especially true in our current economic standing (Source: CNBC by Chris Morris), thus the success of free online games with micro-transactions (Source: Reuters) and the games with in-depth replay value that could last years.  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 & 2 seems to have achieve this feat in their sales and popularity, which is possibly why EA had such high hopes for Medal of Honor.  It's difficult for EA to draw that audience in when Microsoft/Bungie took half of those customers for Halo: Reach and Activision succeeded in having the other half reserve for Call of Duty: Black Ops.  EA's suffers in the market because of this competition, despite their best efforts to deliver.  It is because of these speculations after Medal of Honor's release that NBA Elite 11 was pulled from release.  Medal of Honor looked good, and I even plan on buying it in the future once I finish the current games I haven't completed yet.  But the fan base for Call of Duty and Halo is just too strong and the economy is much too weak for gamers to support sales for EA, despite the quality put into their games.  NBA Elite 11 did look good, but nothing can be done if analysts believe that it would be a waste in production.  For those who feel strongly about having this game released, I suggest gathering a huge petition (it's going to be hard) with at least one million people in support of getting the game onto the shelves of Gamestop and such.  Besides my interest in EA's business, I also feel bad for the team that worked on the game.  Ever worked on a project or paper for several hours and then lose it all because someone stepped on it or the electricity went out?  Think of that time and how you felt and multiply it by several hundred times because that's the amount of work each member of the team took to make the game and not get to see it published and released.  This type of feeling frequently comes back to me since I worked in development of games and I was in the Arts department.  Many games get started, but never released.  Many art projects get completed but is soon thrown out because it wasn't good enough, having to start over from the beginning.

Well, EA has a solid line up of games coming out in the future: Dragon Age 2, Crysis 2, Bulletstorm, Dead Space 2, and I heard a new Battlefield was in development?  We'll see how things turn out for the company.