When EA Sports made the decision to cancel NBA Elite this year, a lot of gamers simply shrugged it off or laughed. After all, EA was touting a ridiculously new mechanics scheme that had less than a year in development. It would have been a gross overestimation had EA actually expected to get it nailed down in time. Due to this decision, EA lost millions upon millions of dollars and took a great risk in losing a good chunk of its faithful buyers within the basketball genre.

As Electronic Arts’ Boss, John Riccitiello understands the risks involved and feels that EA is a company willing to take risks to deliver a great product and on the flip side is willing to take a risk to avoid disaster as well. Riccitiello spoke to Kotaku about the decision to cancel NBA Elite and what it meant for the developer as a whole.

“A more important [point] is: it’s very easy to sequel a product when you don’t seek to change it very much. If you seek to change it fundamentally you’re inherently taking a sizeable risk. When you seek to change something that is on an annual sequel basis you’re taking a really sizeable risk, because if the technology you’re betting on doesn’t come together in the first or second cut, you don’t make your window.

“From time to time we take those risks; usually, in the sports game business only during a platform technology transition. But sometimes, like we did with FIFA, not during a technology transition. We took a similarly ambitious move four years ago with FIFA and pulled it off – in the same studio with many of the same people.

“People admire game companies that take risks,” Riccitiello went on, “but in retrospect they only seem to admire game companies that take risks when the risks work.

“That’s not a risk any more if you only take risks that work. I think of it as like skiing: if you occasionally don’t fall down, you’re not trying hard enough.”

It’s hard to argue with Riccietello about how our society has become a results society and that risks that work are the only ones applauded. This is nothing new though in any industry and despite that, it took a lot of balls for EA Sports to do what it did in pulling a product that just wasn’t going to work. It should also be applauded for taking the risk to overhaul an entire franchise in less than 12 months — that’s not a light task to undertake.

Hopefully NBA Elite will see the light of day next year and the new tech mechanics will be a bit more forgiving.