EA shut down studio they opened less than two years ago, cancel Black Panther game
In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.
According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”
Additionally, both EA’s mobile and central teams will see an unconfirmed number of layoffs – understood by IGN to be less than the 300 workers laid off in April. From the report:
“These decisions are hard,” Miele wrote. “They affect people we’ve worked with, learned from, and shared real moments with. We’re doing everything we can to support them — including finding opportunities within EA, where we’ve had success helping people land in new roles.
EA are reportedly making efforts to find affected workers other roles within the company, via an internal placement programs. “Our partnership with Marvel remains strong and our multi-title, long-term collaboration continues,” Miele told IGN, while also saying in the original email that EA would be focusing on Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex Legends going forward.
EA employees were left “upset and confused” at a return to office mandate earlier this month. In-person work, said CEO Andrew Wilson in an email to employees, leads to “a kinetic energy that fuels creativity, innovation, and connection, often resulting in unexpected breakthroughs that lead to incredible experiences for our players”. Last year, EA laid off 5% of their workforce, (around 670). Despite these recent layoffs, the company now employs 800 more people than this time last year, report Game File (paywalled). IGN note this is likely due to EA increasing the size of core teams, which scans with Miele’s stated focus on a few select game series.
Between them, Andrew Wilson and Laura Miele took home around $40 million in 2024.
Here’s a good video on the EA-published Spore I watched some of last night. When Spore was released, it shipped with some undisclosed dodgy DRM software named Securom that limited each copy to three device installs via a code. If you happened to upgrade your hardware during this time, there’s a chance you would have been locked out of playing the game you bought. Partly as a result, Spore remains one of the most pirated games of all time, although whether you should pirate every product Andrew Wilson has a hand in from now until the end of time is the sort of question you’ll have to answer yourself.
