NBA Live won’t be joining the rest of its EA sports buddies this year. While FIFA, Madden, and NHL are all set for their regular annual release dates, NBA Live is set for fiscal Q4, which pegs the basketball game for an early 2017 release.
The news comes from a 2017 fiscal year slide presentation that shows EA’s console game release schedule up to March next year. NBA Live sits in the fiscal year’s fourth quarter, which means it’ll release sometime between January and March 2017. The slide presentation also shows NBA Live without its year number, which is the norm for EA’s annual sports games. You can check out the slide presentation for yourself right here.
This news comes as a surprise, as back in 2014, EA “guaranteed” NBA Live 16 and 17 to release in the next two years. “We’ve already started development on 16,” series executive producer Sean O’Brien said in 2014. “We’re staffing up. We’re actually increasing investment on what 16–and 17–look like.”
GameSpot will keep you updated on the next NBA Live game as more information becomes available.
This presentation also tells us that Titanfall 2 will launch by the end of the year. With Battlefield 1 set to release on October 21, EA will most likely want to keep the two releases as far apart as possible. In addition to Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare‘s early November release, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the second Titanfall release in late November or December. However, this has not been confirmed.