EA’s decided to go back to the cutting well. Its execs have decided to cancel a Black Panther game that was in the works at Cliffhanger Games, and close the studio for good measure. An unspecified number of people will lose their jons or have to transition to other roles within EA as a result.
This is according to a report from IGN, which cites an email from EA Entertainment president Laura Miele about these latest cuts as having said that they’re part of the publisher’s ongoing efforts to “sharpen our focus” and go hard on “the most significant growth opportunities”. Yep, it’s 2025, and a liscenced Marvel tie-in revolving around a popular movie franchise apparently isn’t a good opportunity to make money.
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EA hasn’t confirmed the number of staff affected by Cliffhanger’s closure and some layoffs to its mobile and central teams it’s enacting at the same time, with IGN understanding that less people will be hit than the roughly 300 impacted by the layoffs the publisher enacted just last month.
That last round, in case you’ve lost track of EA’s wanton self-destruction by this point, involved staff at respawn and came with the news that an in-development Titanfall game had been consigned to the scrapheap.
“These decisions are hard,” Miele wrote in the email, “They affect people we’ve worked with, learned from, and shared real moments with. We’re doing everything we can to support them — including finding opportunities within EA, where we’ve had success helping people land in new roles.”
We’d not seen anything of this Black Panther game from Cliffhanger following its announcement back in 2023. That announcement revealed that it’d be a third-person, single-player thing featuring “an expansive and reactive world that empowers players to experience what it is like to take on the mantle of Wakanda’s protector, the Black Panther”. In 2024, a job listing hinted that world could be an open one.
So, it’s impossible to say if it’d have been a good, bad, or just decent game had it gone the distance. But, like, what are we doing here if even games like this don’t get the chance to make it to an end result? Miele said that EA plans to continue to put cash into Motive’s Iron Man game and the next Star Wars: Jedi game from Respawn.
Aside from that though, the publisher’s continued move away from liscenced titles looks to be seeing it pretty much circle the wagons around Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, Apex Legends, and the Mass Effect game what’s left of BioWare is now working on.
After all, why bother giving yourself lots of chances to make money, when you can put all of your eggs into an increasingly dwindling basket and desperately pray that nothing ever goes wrong with any of them?
