After being told for over a month that NBA Elite 11 was officially just "delayed," EA Sports has finally announced that the inaugural edition will never be hitting store shelves. A few have leaked out and were sold for hundreds of dollars on CraigsList and Ebay but none ever made it to retail. This news was widely expected with NBA Jam officially being announced as a standalone game on Xbox 360 and PS3 but was not made official until this week. The series has also officially been shifted over to the EA Tiburon studio that's famous for Madden and NCAA. EA tried to go the MVP Baseball/NHL route of fixing their NBA series to make it competitive with 2K's behemoth, which announced a 3D version that will ship in two weeks, but ultimately failed epically with the first edition. They even brought David Littman over from NHL but even he couldn't do the job. We'll have to wait until September 2011 most likely to play an EA basketball game again aside from NBA Jam, which will hit stores soon. Things really can't get much worse for EA and basketball.
