Speaking in an interview with Axios, EA Sports general manager Daryl Holt said that in the next five years, EA Sports is looking to expand its audience to 500 million players, more than double the current figure, and that it plans to do that by expanding into “new business models, new geographies.” The company is looking to deliver “a sustained offering of sports gaming content to players around the clock,” according to Axios’ report.

“We’re creating very much a social aspect and social networks within our games,” says Holt.

As for NBA, EA brought the NBA Live line of games to a halt in 2019, stating back then that it was working on a rework of the franchise, and Holt says that work is continuing. “We’ve got some next-generation HD basketball projects that we have been talking about and designing and working on,” he said.

Meanwhile, with Konami recently having rebranded its long-running Pro Evolution Soccer series as eFootball, an ongoing free-to-play live service platform, could EA adopt that approach with its own annual franchises anytime soon? Holt says that though the annual release cycles for these games isn’t going to be dropped anytime soon, EA is still going to keep an eye on that business model to see if it can be adopted in the future.

“I think it is an evolution that is happening around the gaming industry in different ways,” he said. “How we unlock the big beat of sports into that type of a service, I think we’ll see over the course of the future.”

While FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL, and UFC games continue to be successful for EA Sports, the company is looking to expand and improve in other areas as well. With the recent acquisition of Codemasters, F1 has, of course, been brought under the EA Sports label, while EA’s recent acquisition of mobile games developer Playdemic also signifies the company’s intent to drive growth in the mobile space.

When it comes to sports games, EA has a most of that world on lockdown. Whether it comes to American football with Madden or Football (Soccer) with FIFA, they are almost synonymous with digital sports. But there’s always been one court they’ve never managed to conquer: basketball. While they’ve tried to several times with their NBA Live series, 2K has ruled that world with their NBA 2K series for years. That won’t be changing anytime soon, as NBA Live stumbled in a bad way this year.

During their quarterly conference call, EA confirmed that this year’s entry in the franchise, NBA Live 20, has been canceled. Considering how we have heard so little about the game, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Apparently the game and franchise is being redesigned in some way for the future. No details were given as to what that entails, but apparently more solid details will be revealed next year.

While NBA Live was a solid effort, it always lagged far behind the juggernaut that is NBA 2K. Whether or not EA can rework the franchise into something competitive remains to be seen, but hopefully a year off can be a big help to do so.

Peter Moore, EA Sports president, explains: “We plan to profoundly evolve the interactive basketball experience in a way that the category has not seen for a decade. In NBA Elite 11, we’ll introduce a gameplay experience that gives fans the control on the court that they have been begging for in a basketball game for years” apparently NBA Elite 11 will have an all “new control scheme and a real-time physics system”.

The game is set to be release this October.