NCAA Basketball 11 Cancelled, Future in Doubt (Gameinformer)

[jWILL253]

A trend I am seeing from the sports gaming genre: lack of innovative titles = lack of sales. The victims:

NBA: The Life (Sony)
College Hoops (2K Sports)
All Pro Football (2K Sports)
MVP Baseball (EA Sports)
NCAA Basketball (EA Sports)
Inside Drive (Microsoft)
Fever (Microsoft)
Rivals (Microsoft)
Gameday (Sony/989 Studios)
Shootout (Sony/989 Studios)
Gamebreaker (Sony/989 Studios)

Soon-to-be victims:

NCAA Football (EA Sports)
MLB 2K (2K Sports)
NHL 2K (2K Sports)

Sports games are declining in sale dramatically because of three reasons , IMO:

1. Lack of innovation. While most sports games are meant to appeal to the casual audience, all the casual audience sees are yearly re-issues. Sports games might as well be magazines to them.

2. Lack of competition. EA Sports exclusivity vs. 2K Sports exclusivity. Nuff said.

3. Lack of quality (for BOTH consoles). It's bad enough already that there are 9 (yeah, you read right: N.I.N.E.!!!) different PS3 models, and 5 Xbox models (the first of which shouldn't have even been sold to the market). So, now, I gotta think about which version I get because it's better for ONE console and the others are crap?!

Oh, they play the same? Still, though, why do almost ALL the sports games that come out for 360 have custom soundtracks, and the only PS3 sports games that have it is The Show and SmackDown vs. Raw 2010?

Sports games have failed this generation...

[JerseySuave4]

The college basketball games werent profitable because they werent that good. College Hoops 2k8 wasnt bad but it was dealing with competition from EA which diminished sales. You would think with 1 college bball game that it could gain the sales from former 2k8 gamers but EA's college basketball games have been so piss poor that people refuse to make the jump and instead just update the rosters.

I wish 2k could and would now take another stab at college basketball. Just take the NBA 2k10 engine, tweak it a little to fit the college game and i think the game would sell well. If the game is good, people will buy it. When its a quality game, it will get the press and coverage and hype it deserves which will then develop more interest and then the sales will come.

But EA's games have sucked, haven't gotten great reviews so even if someone was curious, just reading reviews and opinions on the game would turn them away because of the negativity.

The only thing EA has is Madden, College Football, NHL & Fifa. And the only reason Madden & College football do the numbers they do is the popularity of football and the fact that they are the only ones making football games with authenticity because of the license. Its not because those games are really that great. And i used to be a huge EA supporter but now the only EA game i get is NCAA Football because i love college football so much. Well i shouldnt say that because EA has fooled me on the Madden hype the past 3 years and i was stupid enough to buy them, play them for 2 weeks, realize how bad they sucked and then sold them back. But not happening this year.

The problem is EA has done a terrible job adapting to the Next Gen systems with their football, basketball & baseball games while other companies have done well utilizing the next gen systems but dont have the licenses that EA does. 2k had good physics and gameplay with All Pro Football but didnt have the NFL. They cant do a college game either. Their basketball game is the best. Baseball theyve struggled but Sony has taken over that with The Show. EA has a slight edge with NHL and of course Fifa is great.

But EA is destroying franchise after franchise.

[JerseySuave4]

jwill, NCAA Football does good sales numbers, that game won't be dying. I do agree the innovation is starting to lack there but i think EA's football games just dont feel like football should feel. I can't believe i'm saying this but 2k's football games feel and play like football should. I think if 2k could make an NFL game, you would see Madden struggle bigtime because you can only live off reputation and name for so long. We saw with The Show, which wasn't a popular title, that when you produce quality, it will surpass name recognition in time and now The Show is basically the only baseball game worth buying (unless you have a 360).

[nolan273]

Quote: Originally Posted by Court_vision

There hasn't been anyone working on the game for 3 months...the whole team was finished back in Nov. No patch...nothing. There won't be dlc + updates. There's no one to do them... EA completely abandoned the game unfortunately.

I think he's speaking about in the future if EA were to release a college hoops game biennially and release DLC and patches between retail releases.

[Swingking77]

Still though, you'd have to wonder if this kind of thing could result in NCAA no longer wanting EA as an exclusive partner, as I'm sure it somehow hurts their bottom line... If this were to happen, all of a sudden there's an open door for the 2K once again... I'm sure the NCAA is none to happy about this decision as the Final Four tournament is a huge deal with them, and no NCAA basketball game, means no Final Four game... If it were to happen... The licence gone and 2K could make an NCAA football game again, kind of like EAs baseball games...

[Gotmadskillzson]

Well now I feel special that I bought their last game.

[nolan273]

Quote: Originally Posted by Gotmadskillzson

Well now I feel special that I bought their last game.

Collector's Item, bro!

[BaylorBearBryant]

The crappy thing is, there's no way to edit a player's class so it'll be near impossible to update rosters next season.