Moore curbs NBA Street

Last week, EA CEO John Riccitiello offered an evocative analogy on the cancellation of Command & Conquer first-person shooter Tiberium, saying, "When you burn the omelet, you don't serve it." Riccitiello, who after retur ning to the publisher's top position last year has been on a tear to realign the company under an emphasis on quality, further said, "EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever."

Making good on that promise, EA has delivered one more concoction unto the compost bin. Speaking to ESPN, EA Sports president Peter Moore confirmed that NBA Street has been placed on indefinite hiatus. Elaborating on EA Sports' decision to bench the franchise, Moore told ESPN that the move reflected the company's push toward creating its own intellectual properties within its Freestyle brand.

"We'll still do traditional sports, but we're going to do them a different way," he said. "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."

NBA Street: Homecourt, released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in February 2007, may have hit Riccitiello's professed minimum standard for quality in critics' eyes, but sales for the most recent installment in the franchise came up woefully short. As of August 2008, Homecourt had sold only 380,000 units across both platforms, according to The NPD Group.