A Black Panther online game has just been canceled at massive publisher EA—which additionally introduced as we speak that it was closing Cliffhanger Video games, the interior studio growing the title. That is the second online game primarily based off of a significant superhero IP to get dumped in the last few months, after Warner Bros. Discovery introduced it was killing off a Marvel Lady recreation. That title was being created by veteran developer Monolith, whose former vice chairman, Kevin Stephens, departed the corporate in 2021… to discovered Cliffhanger Video games. So, yeah, not a very good couple of months for anyone concerned in that cut up.
EA Leisure president Laura Mielle issued a letter to workers as we speak during which she mentioned the identical factor fits at all times are likely to say in conditions like this: The cancellation and firing was performed to “sharpen our focus and put our inventive power behind essentially the most important development alternatives,” she’s unhappy these firings will “have an effect on folks we’ve labored with, discovered from, and shared actual moments with,” and so on. (Why will nobody consider the “actual moments”?) The upshot, apparently is that EA is much less today in making licensed video games, as a result of you must give Disney a reasonably respectable chunk of change to get the model, after which if the sport doesn’t promote insanely properly, your all-important phantasm of infinite development will get skewered. After all, it’s value noting that an upcoming Star Wars recreation, and one primarily based on Iron Man, are nonetheless in lively growth, so if you wish to draw any conclusions about which superhero IPs get deemed liabilities first when the axes start to fall, we actually can’t cease you from doing that.
That is the second set of layoffs EA has deployed in latest months, having previously laid off 300 employees back in April, lots of them from Titanfall studio Respawn. (Creators of mentioned Star Wars recreation, the third installment within the Jedi franchise, by the by.) Mielle says the corporate is “doing every thing we are able to to help” these affected by this newest spherical of layoffs, “together with discovering alternatives inside EA, the place we’ve had success serving to folks land in new roles.”
[via IGN]
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