'Dead Space' Maker Visceral Games Taken Off 'Star Wars' Game, Shut Down by EA
Visceral studios, best known for their story-driven action-horror series "Dead Space," is now dead. Electronic Arts have taken them off the new "Star Wars" game that they have been working on since 2013 and shut down the studio.
This bombshell of an announcement was confirmed with an update post from EA themselves, which they posted on their website. EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund explained the new development via the post.
"Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game," he began, adding how EA has been testing the game concepts with players and gathering feedback, including "closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace."
In the end, the publisher came to a conclusion to revamp the entire thing. "It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design," Söderlund wrote.
Viscreal studio will now "be ramping down and closing," with its teams and assets being redistributed to the other EA projects. EA Worldwide Studios will be taking over the upcoming "Star Wars" game, which currently has no release schedule as of this time, according to Polygon.
The move has been a controversial one for the game development scene, and the gaming community in general. A former employee, now working for another company, came forward to share his perspective on EA's way of handling game development.
Zach Wilson, a level designer and former employee of Visceral, took to Twitter to quote some figures from the "Dead Space 2" development project. "Dead Space 2 cost 60 Million dollars to make and they were merciless with their budget. they only sold 4 mil and that wasn't enough," he wrote, suggesting that EA could have made the budget more generous to improve the game.
"Cause you gotta spend 60 million dollars marketing it and you take a huge hit from MS and retailers taking their cut," he explained, adding that it's the publishers who get "90% of the $$$."
