Dead Space Developer Visceral Games Closes as Star Wars Project is ‘Reimagined’

The game, which is set in the Star Wars universe, has already had its concepts tested with players, and EA says that their feedback – as well as “fundamental shifts in the marketplace” – has spurred it to make changes. It is why players are seeing more of these types of games incorporate multi-player, loot boxes, or both. At the time, Visceral’s game was described as an action adventure game. In other words, they started making Uncharted and now they want Destiny.

Electronic Arts has announced that it is closing down Visceral Games.

Player progression is key to this game structure as well, with the player character’s gear usually being the key driver of this. Even open-world games like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed have had healthy licensing programmes due to being pioneers in their genre but what of the countless others that fall by the wayside? The studio is best known for the Dead Space trilogy, along with a number of ’90s and ’00s games in the Lord of the Rings and 007 franchises. Later this month we’ll see Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein II, and Assassin’s Creed Origins all released on the very same day, rounding out a year that has seen plenty of similar single-player titles. The studio has been working on an untitled action-adventure Star Wars project with Amy Hennig of Uncharted fame at the lead.

Sadly for fans of Visceral’s often visceral output, the company is no more.

Now, former Dead Space developer has come forward and revealed that despite Dead Space 2 being a critical hit and selling 4 million units, it wasn’t financially successful. The original game, under Hennig’s direction, was expected to arrive in 2018; that window no longer applies to the new project.

Numerous people involved will still have work. The game was supposed to be out in Fiscal 2019 but now it sounds like it has been delayed until much later than that. Unfortunately, publishers haven’t realigned their expectations where sales numbers are confirmed, so a big budget triple-A title that fails to net millions in shifted units, is deemed a failure and inevitably, it’s the studio and its employees that ultimately end up paying the price. One thing is for certain though, that Visceral and the games they made in their heyday will be missed. A unusual an unexpected turn of events that gets even stranger when you read EA executive VP Patrick Söderlund’s post on the matter.