EA has announced that it will close one of its major developers, Visceral Studios. Known for its creation of the Dead Space series, as well as the Godfather games among many others, it was said to be working on a brand new, open-world Star Wars game. As a near 20 year-old studio, this ends the long life of a classic development house. It also heralds the end of Visceral's development of the Star Wars game it had in the works, though EA has said it will move that game over to one of its other in-house studios.
"Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe," EA’s Patrick Söderlund said in the announcement. "In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. 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."
This closure doesn't mean that the developers themselves are out of work necessarily. EA has said it plans to shift as many over to other projects and companies as possible. But of course, not everyone may wish to go and it will no doubt be a sad day for those who will miss working with colleagues they have been together with for years.
The big reason behind this move appears to be a further transition of EA into more of a games as a service business model. It could well be that whatever the Star Wars game ends up being, it will have more of an ongoing charge component, or fund itself as a freemium release and for that, EA wanted someone else to take over.
This means that the game will no longer launch next year as intended, but as Kotaku points out, sometime in 2019 instead.
