NBA Live 20 was canceled back in 2019, so why is its official rating just now showing up on the ESRB's website?
The listing for EA's non-starting basketball game just recently went live, as spotted by GameSpot. The game is listed for PC, PS4, and Xbox One with an E rating for "Mild Lyrics" (if you're curious, "the word 'hell' is heard in one of the game's songs", but we'll always have to wonder about which song it would have been). It's more likely to be a glitch on the ESRB's side than a secret leak of EA's future plans for its troubled NBA franchise, though the timing is interesting.
When EA announced that it would not release a new basketball game for the 2019-2020 NBA season, it said that it was expanding its vision for the series and "leaning hard into the new leading edge platforms" - which could refer to mobile devices or cloud streaming, but was also likely a reference to PS5 and Xbox Series X before either were officially announced. The new console generation is officially here, so EA may not keep us waiting too much longer to see what its new basketball vision will be.
I've reached out to an EA Sports representative to see if the company is aware of any reason for the NBA Live 20 listing to go live on the ESRB just now, and I'll update this story with any response.
