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A Black Panther video game has just been canceled at massive publisher EA—which also announced today that it was closing Cliffhanger Games, the internal studio developing the title. This is the second video game based off of a major superhero IP to get dumped in the last few months, after Warner Bros. Discovery announced it was killing off a Wonder Woman game. That title was being created by veteran developer Monolith, whose former vice president, Kevin Stephens, departed the company in 2021… to found Cliffhanger Games. So, yeah, not a good couple of months for anybody involved in that split.
EA Entertainment president Laura Mielle issued a letter to employees today in which she said the same thing suits always tend to say in situations like this: The cancellation and firing was done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities,” she’s sad these firings will “affect people we’ve worked with, learned from, and shared real moments with,” etc. (Why will no one think of the “real moments”?) The upshot, apparently is that EA is less interested these days in making licensed games, because you have to give Disney a pretty decent chunk of change to get the brand, and then if the game doesn’t sell insanely well, your all-important illusion of infinite growth gets skewered. Of course, it’s worth noting that an upcoming Star Wars game, and one based on Iron Man, are still in active development, so if you want to draw any conclusions about which superhero IPs get deemed liabilities first when the axes begin to fall, we certainly can’t stop you from doing that.
This is the second set of layoffs EA has deployed in recent months, having previously laid off 300 employees back in April, many of them from Titanfall studio Respawn. (Creators of said Star Wars game, the third installment in the Jedi franchise, by the by.) Mielle says the company is “doing everything we can to support” those affected by this latest round of layoffs, “including finding opportunities within EA, where we’ve had success helping people land in new roles.”
[via IGN]
