Well, some of us knew this was probably coming. EA Sports has officially delayed NBA Live 13, and with the upcoming basketball already downgraded from full retail game to downloadable title, things look grim.

EA Sports made the announcement earlier today that the game’s intended October release isn’t happening:

We’ve been working hard on the game, and so we’re excited to share our first in-game trailer today.

Many fans have been anticipating an early October launch, but our plan is to release at a later date. We will share more information in the future.

Although it sounds like the development team is hard at work, this news isn’t encouraging for many reasons.

Starting back in 1995, EA Sports published a yearly update to the NBA Live series up through 2010 before production and various glitches led to the canceled NBA Elite 11. Since then, 2K Sports’ NBA2K franchise has practically run the basketball genre without any serious competition.

Of course, it also helps that 2K Sports keeps churning out well-polished, high-production NBA games year after year, constantly tweaking and polishing the gameplay. They’ve got everything down a science at this point, and by the time next-generation hardware rolls around, things will get really interesting.

However, iron sharpens iron, and EA might still be able to funnel some of the energy that goes into Madden and FIFA back into their basketball game. We’ll keep an ear out for EA Sports’ next move.

Source: EA Sports