Electronic Arts has announced the closure of Ridgeline Games, the studio working on a new single-player Battlefield campaign.
As reported by IGN, the project is reportedly set to continue with “some” employees from Ridgeline set to join Ripple Effect – another Battlefield studio working on a different experience within the franchise.
This is according to an internal note seen by IGN, which suggested Criterion producer Danny Isaac and studio head of creative Darren White will take over the project following the departure of Ridgeline’s former head and founder Marcus Lehto yesterday.
GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to EA for further clarification.
The news followed mass layoffs at EA, which will see 5% of its workforce cut as part of its restructuring plan which involves closing offices and sunsetting some of its live service games.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in a note to staff that the company is planning to “move away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.”
Im glad these studios are seeing the writing on the wall and taking control away from Embracer. Embracer is just fucking shit up closing up studios and killing off games in development.
And I asked this elsewhere, but what the hell is Embracer doing? Theyre eating themselves alive by doing this. Whats their endgame? How are they supposed to have any profits when theyre dumping all their product? Just how much debt did they get themselves in?
This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it's very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They'll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.
This is crazy, between this and Gearbox leaving they’re almost dismantling in front of our eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this in the gaming industry, at least not in this scale.
They seemed to be acquiring and funding good things for a while there, and then out of the blue went “oops, spent a bit too much there lol, gotta melt some of these down for cash” and then threw some seriously good shit right into the crucible.
They acquired far too much as they expected a $2B deal with Saudi Arabia. That fell through and they’ve been shedding everything but the CEOs (at least from what I can find)
“Out of the blue”. They were gobbling up studios as nothing more than assets. Any “good” that came of that process was purely incidental and this sandbag dumping when they started to sink was inevitable.
Good for them. Also glad they are going to continue developing the KOTOR remake, although with everything that's happened with that project it feels like it will be years before we see it again.
iirc these are the guys working on the Knights of the Old Republic remake, right? Good news for that project if that’s the case, and good news for Saber in general!
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Aktywne