NBA Live 13 is effectively delayed indefinitely. While EA Sports may say the game isn't, technically, delayed because it was never given a release date, the publisher today acknowledged many had expected it to release Oct. 2 alongside competitor NBA 2K13, and said it's giving the NBA Live development team more time to shore up a game that left E3 roundly panned and had gone AWOL in the three months since.
The release of that trailer above, however, at least pushes back speculation that the entire project would be scrapped, the fate that befell its predecessor, NBA Elite 11, back in 2010. But EA Sports provided no guidance on when this game would release, whether that would be in the month of October or even 2012. A release on Oct. 2 would seem to be off the table, though.
An EA Sports spokesman also would not comment on rumors that the game would be released as a download-only version over Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store.
"The team is making steady progress, and we're continuing our work on NBA Live," Andrew Wilson, the executive vice president in charge of the EA Sports label, said in a statement. "We remain focused on rebuilding this franchise for the future."
Another statement from EA Sports acknowledged that customers had been anticipating an Oct. 2 release but "our plan is to release at a later date. We will share more information in the future."
Questioned by Kotaku, an EA Sports spokesman refused to discuss release format, time frame, or the game's anticipated feature set. Asked why this series, which has been off shelves for three years, couldn't hit an Oct. 2 release date with a 70-man team in place for a year, he said:
"We're not going to get into that level of detail with this announcement. In early April, you saw where we were with this project and how ambitious it was, that they had to take down the code of Elite and rebuild it. Its easy to surmise that also took time, in the development cycle, to get the whole thing up to speed. It was an ambitious project and it is a challenging game to create."
Asked if anyone from the NBA Live team had lost his job, Kotaku was told—apparently as a prepared statement—that EA Sports had "no announcements regarding staffing."
NBA Live 13 was moved to EA Sports' Tiburon studio in early 2011 after NBA Elite 11, the successor to NBA Live 10, was canceled one week before its scheduled release in 2010. Much of the first year of development was spent tearing down the last version of the game and salvaging its parts. The current development team didn't hit full strength until about a year ago.