Moore: NBA Elite "not walking off the court crying"

Former EA Sports head Peter Moore has acknowledged NBA 2K's achievements, which led to EA's own basketball sim taking a year's sabbatical, but said the franchise will be back to battle it out.

Moore, who once worked with the NBA 2K team, told IndustryGamers that now 2K Sports has dropped its hockey series, NBA 2K represents "probably 80 percent of their portfolio from a unit basis and a revenue basis" - and is presumably built to a level of quality which reflects that investment.

"It’s a great game, but we’re not walking off the court crying here," Moore said. "We took a year off so that we can focus on building the quality that it needs to be.

"We’re focused on building a great game for next year. The team has got the time to be able to look at everything that we need to do to make sure that we bring quality back up and be competitive."

"We’re not just going to walk away from it; we’ve got a very, very talented team that’s already got stuff up and running even though it won't ship this year, it'll go next year. So we’ll be back."

Brave words, but Moore concedes it may take EA Sports some time to claw back market share after leaving 2K to dominate for a whole year.

"It’ll take a while to get back, yeah. It’ll take us a few years maybe, but if that’s what it takes, that's what it'll be," he said.

"We’re not a short term player. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we’ll sit here three, four years from now and hopefully we’ll be talking about what a great battle NBA 14 or 15 is versus their 14 or 15."

EA Sports' basketball sim series, NBA Live, was rebranded as NBA Elite 11 before being cancelled.