Respawn's acquisition comes not even a month after EA shut down Visceral Games. The studio offered its blood and sweat on titles like the Dead Space franchise and Battlefield Hardline. Visceral was working on its own original Star Wars title, code-named Ragtag, before EA summarily decided to close the studio and move the production assets to another EA studio.
EA has a history of acquiring great studios, mishandling them, and ultimately shutting them down. Bullfrog Productions in 2001, Westwood Studios in 2003, Maxis in 2004, Origin Systems in 2004, Pandemic Studios in 2009, Phenomic Game Development, DreamWorks Interactive, Playfish and Black Box Games in 2013, Mythic Entertainment in 2014. Those are the studios behind classics like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Command & Conquer, SimCity, The Sims, Ultima, Mercenaries, Star Wars: Battlefront, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed, and Dark Age of Camelot. And none of that counts internal or satellite studios that have been killed, like Danger Close, Bioware Montreal, DICE Canada, and Easy Studios.
Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt explains how the studio name comes from a name translation, plus the background on the game title “Helldivers.”
Microsoft's Activision subsidiary announced today that it is opening a new game development studio to take advantage of the huge talent pool growing in Poland. It'll be the second Activision studio based in the region, joining Infinity Ward Krakow, although this studio is, in fact, not working on Call of Duty.
Developer Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse announce that their city building sim Manor Lords has sold over two million copies since launch.
Still waiting for its first patch which is worrying. I know it’s been a single man developer but there’s really no excuse for no updates being released since launch. I’ve been part of many single developer releases that are updated daily, sometimes hourly. This’s hasn’t had a single one yet….
And people think this is great new ? 🙄 Yeah,right. Not every publishers are perfect, but EA is just beyond worse.
Respawn's days are numbered. EA got another one.
RIP Respawn.
I was sad to hear of this. EA does not do well with games that are not sports related. They treat a lot great series like capcom, only worse. So many great titles sent to their demise...
There's only been 5 EA published games that I've purchased since 2006 with those being Dead Space 1 & 2, Mass Effect 1 & 2 and Titanfall 2.
I have no plans on purchasing any EA games in the future.