You know the saying, “the bigger they are the harder they fall”? Well, NBA Live was never that big but it fell incredibly hard.
If you are selling an NBA game but aren’t 2K Games, well your games are barely selling any copies. I mean let’s be honest, how could you compete with a game that has Spike Lee’s name branded on it? NBA Live is suffering, badly. 2K makes up 98% of the sales in the basketball video game market while Live doesn’t even make up 1%, to put it in simpler terms, 2K sold over a million copies this year, making it the best selling sports game launch of the generation and Live only sold 8,000, not 80,000, not 800,000, just 8,000…Yeah, it’s a goddamn massacre.
EA hasn’t had the best luck with their series in recent years, bad reviews, taking time off of the series and even cancelled the console versions of NBA Elite 11 after it had already been printed onto discs and was in the hands of reviewers because it was so bad. 2K however, continues to triumph getting rave reviews (2K16 has an 87 on Metacritic while Live 16 has a low 59), creating stories with people like Spike Lee and as previously mentioned, it manages to be the top dog of the genre.
I’m not sure how long EA can keep this up, the money they must be losing with LIVE must be in the hundred thousands or millions, I wouldn’t expect another NBA Live title after NBA LIVE 17 or 18.
Source: TechnoBuffalo
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.