 Did y'all hear the news? NBA Live 20 is delayed, which is no surprise to anybody. Usually every year EA Play comes around and EA releases all the big juicy details for all their titles. This year they didn't do that with NBA Live. And then just last week, NBA Live 19 updated their roster, which no sports titles ever do. So everybody at that point was like, alright, the game is done, right? Being canceled is being delayed is definitely not coming out in September. And they were true. I think Operation Sports was the first to break it. They dropped the article, NBA Live 20 delayed until late 2019, as team plans a different approach. Yo, gotta give it to EA and NBA Live. It took them 10 years to decide. It was time for a different approach. And they only gave themselves three months to do it, ladies and gentlemen. Yo, I'm gonna be very, very blunt in this video. So if you're a live fanboy and you don't like that, you can get on up out of here, right? This video is not for you. You might get your feelings hurt. I'm not a delusional fan. I'll play the best product, period. And most of you guys who know me know, I was a live fanboy back in the day. I used to go to school ready to fight if you tried to tell me NBA 2K9 was better than NBA Live 09. We were fighting. But there reached a point, especially around NBA Live 10, where I played 2K's my career and I was like, alright, alright, you got me. You got me. The game is dope, okay? And I switched over. I don't know what it was about the game, but it was magnetic. And it was a lot of people who made that switch. So throughout the 2000s, EA was dominating. They had NBA Street for the first half. NBA Live 06 and 07 was fire. So they were murking the whole genre. They added nowhere to 2K King. EA realized it was time to rethink things. And so we didn't get NBA Elite 11. We didn't get NBA Live 12 or NBA Live 13. Meanwhile, 2K dropped the greatest basketball product of all time, NBA 2K11. So at that point, it didn't matter where your allegiances was. If you were a basketball fan, you were playing 2K. And I'm pretty sure that was the year they had the crew. And yo, that was fire. It was, Adidas Live Run was cool, but the crew was fire, man. So a lot of people had a lot of good memories and a lot of people were switching over. And then came NBA Live 14. They had three years to drop this product. And I was so excited. I originally started this channel to do GTA 5 videos. But when I saw NBA Live and NBA 2K 14, I was so gasped I started to make basketball for you. If it wasn't for Live 14, I would have never started doing 2K on this channel. So that's what I did. I just began to speculate and I was so excited. EA was feeding me all the right information. They came out to E3 and showed off their new Ignite engine, tried to tell us Madden, FIFA and NBA Live are gonna use this new Ignite engine. And when FIFA learned something, all the other games benefit. And I was blown away. This was a game changer, ladies and gentlemen. NBA Live was back. Did y'all see the game? Hahaha! Yo, my brother got NBA Live 14 and came with his PS4. So I played it. Flat out it was the worst basketball product of all time. No exaggeration. You might've thought, So whatever they missed a mark, NBA Live 15 is gonna be better. They had all these years to make the game better, to catch up to what 2K was doing. But instead of catching up, they'd been letting 2K get away. 2K introduced the park mode. They added the MyGM and the My League Online. They 2K beat EA at their own game. Think about that. EA is the king of Ultimate Team. I didn't think in my wildest imagination my team would be destroying Ultimate Team the way it is. So I was like, damn. Every year I came with the excitement enthusiasm that it was gonna be the year. They was gonna come back this year and every year I was left disappointed. Then when they was talking about NBA Live 17 and hyping that game up, I just didn't care anymore. Part of me hoped that it was true and the game was gonna be great, but I was no longer foolishly optimistic about the product. They've failed me too many times for me to be just that stupid. And that's what it's been for this franchise. It's a failure. Now that's kinda harsh, agent. I know. But let me put this into perspective. Across all platforms, NBA 2K is regularly selling five, six million copies. Meanwhile, NBA Live is selling three, 400,000. Think about this. The year NBA Playground came out, it outperformed the NBA Live that came out that year. So you might've been wondering, all right, what's the issue? EA is this big ass company we talked about on my last video, the eighth biggest company in terms of market cap. Why are they struggling to compete with 2K? Especially because they used to dominate 2K. What's different? I think what EA thought was that they can put in very little effort and then still take market share away from 2K. They tried all kind of strategies. They tried to deceive people. They tried to make the game on sale for like $4, $3 months into launch. Nothing works. The game is deficient in so many categories and this is, okay, let me get this across. A lot of people will tell me like, but your agent, you ain't even playing NBA Live like that, so how could you know? What the fuck is up with some of y'all? I have to play a game for 80 hours to know it's trash? All right, so let's get down to the details. The main thing people don't like is the animations. They just don't look realistic. I don't know what it is that they're doing down at that Dev Studio at EA for NBA Live, but it's just not coming across as natural movement. It looks weird and anybody that sees it for the first time that's not delusional sees that. And so it's like they already have that one big obstacle. The game doesn't look real. And the couple times NBA Live has even invited me out to their events, the developers knew that. I talked to them about that. They're not delusional, so they know it's an issue. They just don't know how to fix it, okay? But let's put aside the animations and talk about the rest. Just in terms of the amount of animations, dunk animations, dribble animations, shooting animations, all of that stuff. They have a fucking zero compared to 2K. It is a pathetic variety of animations. That's how I put it. The story mode for most live games is horrible. I forgot what year it was, but when they were doing that first take Steven A. Smith stuff, I literally almost wanted to break my monitor. The graphics are all right, especially when it comes to the things like shoes. Those look clean. The UI is great. The soundtrack is usually amazing. But for NBA Live, there was just too many holes in the game. There was no park mode. And even the one mode NBA Live should be killing 2K on, which is ultimate team, they're not doing that. Yo, be serious. NBA 2K is doing all the shenanigans of micro transactions and nobody likes it, right? There's all these server issues and bugs and glitches on NBA 2K. And yet nobody wants to go and just even try the other product. What does that say about what you have going on? So there's no if, ands, or buts about it. They need to, as the article says, try a different approach. They should've did that the first year they took off. When they canceled NBA Elite 11, they should've went different direction. In fact, every year they fucked up. They should've been going in a different direction. NBA Elite 11, if you guys have ever heard of it, it was like they released a demo for it and it was so poorly received they had to cancel the game. But still, you have articles back then saying things like this. Unfortunately, NBA Elite 11 is not ready and we have made a decision to delay it till next month's launch. The decision to delay NBA Elite was hard because the game had great promise? Who are you lying to? Who's buying this stuff? That game had no promise and everyone across the entire genre knew it. If you played the game, you knew it had no hope. That was the one thing you knew, if anything. So while NBA Live should've been moving in a different direction, instead they were focusing on full roster updates for the current year, plus dynamic DNA updates that track players' real-world performance and tendencies. This DLC will be free. God damn, they are so out of touch or they were so out of touch. And then it happened again with NBA Live 17, which was delayed. I don't think this game ever launched. I'm pretty sure it didn't. No, it didn't. EA will double down on the title, pushes release to normal fall timeline, says CEO. But it didn't help that the last installment of NBA Live, NBA Live 16, only sold 8,000 copies in its first week. At this point, I don't even know why the game still exists. I mean, it's good because everybody wants competition, but Jesus, that's a game that's published by EA that has 8,000 copies in the first week. Oh my God. But still, they just trooped through that and for some reason did not change their direction. Until Polygon dropped this article, same things going on with NBA Live 20. Notice a pattern? So you might be wondering, I agent, there's all these problems with the game. What can they do to make it better? Hey, thank you for asking. I have some solutions for you. First of all, holy, why have you guys not done it yet? Release a my part competitor. What the fuck are y'all up to? What planet are you living in right now? I'm not trying to be rude and disrespectful, but come on now. I don't know if you guys know this, but back in the day, when they used to compete with one another, 2K and NBA Live, anytime one game came up with a good idea, the other game would just copy it. That goes for most genres, when it comes to Battle Royales, when it comes to MOBAs, when it comes to strategic games, et cetera. So I can't fathom for the life of me why EA has not already done something like the park. They need a competitor on their game and that's just obvious. That is the first thing they should start working on. If you're gonna beat 2K, you have to start doing what they do better than them. You need more animations, that's for sure. You need better looking animations. I don't know who's working on the animation team, but you need to like get better people or add people to that team, get better technology, whatever it takes to get your game looking realistic. There was hope a few years ago, I remember, that EA was gonna switch to the Frostbite engine. And I don't know too much about engines and all the technical stuff, but I thought that was a good idea back in the day, but I've been reading articles and it doesn't look like the move whatsoever. Just take a look at what happened to games like Mass Effect when they switched over to the Frostbite engine. So maybe Frostbite isn't the answer. Okay, then what is? Maybe they need a proprietary engine specifically designed for NBA Live. Yeah, but that costs money and takes a lot of time. Two things that EA seems like they're not willing to put into their game. So where do you go? Do you make a better story mode? Maybe my career sells pretty well for 2K, so maybe you just continue working on the story mode and try and sell people on that part of the game. The game just doesn't have nearly as much depth as 2K has. 2K has been sweeping the floor with NBA Live for a whole decade. It's gonna take a lot for them to come back. Honestly, I don't even think it's worth it. I keep trying to tell y'all, I really hope they just go back to make it NBA Street. Those games are dope. Literally every year there is this hope. Disappointment after disappointment caused by EA Sports to rethink its yearly basketball series, but NBA Live 18 seems to be headed in the right direction. Every year they're supposedly headed in the right direction. Jesus, man. And then they have to find a different approach. But no, this time for sure. They're 100% guaranteeing that it's the right direction. But then the game doesn't release or is delayed or it comes out and it just sucks. Numbers never lie. And it's a graph of just how meteoric the growth of 2K has been over the last decade. And this is not catching up. This is the opposite of catching up. This is dying. This game is currently dying and they're not doing much to revive it. And I don't even know if I wanna blame the developer. There are some games I look at like NBA 2K or Apex Legends where I say, yo, those developers are talented. They're really good at what they do. They just don't have enough resources, which is sad because the publishers for those companies have a ton of resources. They just don't spend it on the games, whatever. And then there's other titles like NBA Live where I even question whether or not the developers can actually create a good basketball product. And keep in mind, like, I know these are real people I'm talking about. I'm not trying to be disrespectful. I'm just giving my opinion. Yo, that's just disrespectful. To make matters worse, the Switch version of NBA 2K18 sold more than the PlayStation 4 version of NBA. Did you guys see the Switch version of NBA 2K18? Yo, people will do anything to not touch that game. That is sad. Okay, all right, EA. I have a last ditch effort strategy for you, okay? Listen, my consulting fee is free. My guys, you can use this. You and you had to pay me one bit. Spend the next two years creating a new engine. And that engine should be proprietary. It should be designed specifically for NBA Live. That's if you're serious about the game. Meanwhile, release your game free to play. Drop it. Stop doing yearly releases. Stop trying to play with 2K. You can't do it, you try. Release your game one time. Call it NBA Live online. Make it a beta and make it free to play so that anytime people get sick of this game, they could go to your game and then they could just try it out. Maybe they won't like it, but it's free. You can't get mad at a free game. Then over time, as you make updates to the game, people will be like, huh, this game's not so bad. Maybe it's improving. And then when you're in like two to three years, when you guys are done making all the improvements that you need and you've spent those resources to make sure that NBA Live can be that game, then you could release the published version, the final version. This is no beta and make it $60. Or just release it free to play and just won't lab around. That is free strategic analysis right here you got from me. And you don't even have to pay me for that. That is free. There's a lot y'all have to do for that game. And it almost seems insurmountable at this point because back in NBA Live 14, maybe you guys stood a chance. But yo, 2K is running away with it, man. But at the end of the day, it's EA. They have money and they make a ton of money. So if they once, they could really make something happen. Or of course, you guys could just make an NBA Street game. And I would buy it. I would literally be your first customer. I'm just saying, man. Maybe you guys just can't compete with 2K on sim. What's the point of trying? Maybe it's not worth the effort and the time and the resources. Maybe it's just not worth it. So those are my opinions, ladies and gentlemen. I think that NBA Live 20 is going to be canceled. I think that because EA has tried so many different direction, just make it free to play. Just take a shot, man. What's wrong with y'all? You don't want to try something new? Come on, EA, stop playing with me. You literally released Apex Legends free to play and that game's been killing it. Now granted, it's actually a good game. But hey, who knows? Maybe people will play a bad game if it's free. You never know, guys. I want this video to come on cost as disrespectful. I've realized over the course of doing these videos, years over years over years, these are people and yo, sometimes they tie their ego to the game because it's their baby. They created this baby. But this is my opinion. You don't have to like it or you don't have to agree with me. But most of it is facts. Hey, if you enjoyed the video, drop a like, subscribe to the channel. I'm hopeful, but am I optimistic? No, because I'm not falling for that trap again. Until EA proves me wrong. I'll catch you guys in the next one.