
In a recent interview with ESPN.com Jon Robinson, EA Sports prez John Moore said that you shouldn't expect a new NBA Street title anytime soon. The franchise, which has been pretty good since it debuted in 2001 for PS2, has seen four iterations of the game and it looks like that it's enough for now.
"We'll still do traditional sports, but we're going to do them a different way," Moore told Robinson. "Street is a good example. We built a new Freestyle brand to do different things, and we also need to build our own intellectual properties. We rely on other people's IP for everything we do and we need to develop some new things. In the old days we had things like SSX that were our own intellectual property, but since then we've kind of moved away from that. We need a mixture of experiences that are not only for the hardcore, 'it's in the game' crowd. But if Wii Sports has taught us anything, it's that people will sit there and play big head tennis all day long. We need to be able to tap into that audience. We need to have something for that sports fan who might not necessarily be a sports gamer, but who wants that 15-minute experience without having to struggle on how to use the controller."
The NBA Street, NFL Street and FIFA Street franchises were all under EA Sports sub-label "EA Big." Now EA is rockin' this "Freestyle" brand. But with the way the first Freestyle brand game, Facebreaker, was received... let's hope it gets better.