Electronic Arts has yet to officially announce NBA Live 20, this year’s installment in its troubled simulation basketball franchise, but on Tuesday, the publisher quietly delayed the game into the last quarter of the year.
While EA hasn’t publicly spoken about NBA Live 20, let alone marketed the game, it did appear in the schedule of upcoming releases that the publisher put out in May, alongside its earnings report for the 2019 fiscal year. In EA’s slide presentation for investors, the company slotted NBA Live 20 into the second quarter of its 2020 fiscal year — which runs from July 1 to Sept. 30 — alongside all three of the other annual EA Sports titles: Madden NFL 20, NHL 20, and FIFA 20.
EA released a new financial report on Tuesday, detailing its earnings for the first quarter of fiscal 2020, which ended June 30. NBA Live 20 still appears in the slide presentation accompanying that earnings statement — but it’s listed in the third fiscal quarter, which means EA is now planning to release the game between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31.
Reached for comment, an EA Sports representative told Polygon, “We’re planning a different approach to NBA LIVE this year, and will have more to share in the quarter ahead.”
If it's an October release, then that's not too bad. It might even be a good opportunity, striking when people are starting to find issues with NBA 2K20 and the NBA season is tipping off. However, it's not a great look, and I can't help but worry a bit about talk of a "different approach". That kind of talk makes me think that NBA Live is going to continue moving in a direction we don't want it to, but it is admittedly easy to read too much into these things.