Will 
EA’s NBA woes ever end?
After keeping its NBA Live franchise on the bench for the last four years, the publisher managed to release a new iteration in the once-proud franchise in 2013 — but pretty much everyone hated it.
NBA Live 14 currently has a Metacritic score of just 46. User scores are a dismal 2.5 out of 10. And now, EA has a message to its fans: It’s sorry.
In 
a year where there have been plenty of head-scratching moves by video game publishers, EA’s decision to sit out yet another NBA season is perhaps the most baffling.
It is nothing short of a colossal failure on the part of the company that has historically been the leader in sports games. The company’s inability to put together a high quality (or even remotely competitive) product in the ample time budgeted to do so has given Take-Two de facto exclusivity in a lucrative field for the third consecutive year. And barring a miracle or some extraordinarily savvy maneuvering, it may have just ceded the category forever.
Despite 
several promises that its flagship basketball franchise would return after a three-year absence, EA has decided to once again bench NBA Live.
The decision is likely to disappoint fans who were hoping to see some competition in the NBA field once again, but is terrific news for 2K Sports, whose NBA2K 13 will once again have the court to itself.
More 
than six months ago, Electronic Arts announced that after a two-year absence, NBA Live would be returning to store shelves this fall in a reboot that would “[capture] the future of basketball.”
But with a mere two months to go before the tip off of this year’s NBA season, we don’t know much more about the game. It was at E3, but no one was allowed to touch it, and it didn’t look great. Since then? Virtually nothing. What’s going on here?
In 2010, Electronic Arts waited until the 
last second to cancel its flagship NBA game. This year, it’s bowing out long before the season begins.
The leader in video game sports has quietly announced plans to bypass this season and release its next installment of NBA Elite (formerly called NBA Live) in the fall of 2012. That will create a three-year gap between releases, a significant fall for what used to be the leading basketball sports simulation.
While ads in video games may not be popular, they are effective.
A new study by Nielsen finds that targeted advertising can result in a substantial increase in sales – and that could spur companies who have been sitting on the fence to jump into the gaming world.
The study looked at in-game Gatorade ads in six EA Sports titles, including the last two installments of the company’s “NHL” franchise and the 2007, 2008 and 2009 versions of “NBA Live”. People who played those games increased their household dollars spent on the sports drink by 24 percent.
Chris Morris: Journalist 