All right folks, put your pitchforks away and shed up your torches. There's no reason to go all interweb riot-mob on EA...for now. Dead Space 4 – which has not been announced – is not being canceled. According to EA's Peter Moore, the whole fiasco of Dead Space 4 being canned because Dead Space 3 didn't move five-million SKUs out of the gate is “patently false”.
Yesterday Gamasutra tweeted about an EA rep denying an article published by Videogamer.com that claimed they had inside info about Dead Space 4 being canned. The game was purportedly in early prototype stages of development but after the numbers rolled in, it became obvious that Dead Space 3 wasn't going to hit the golden five mark, so EA pulled the plug on Dead Space 4.
Kotaku actually has a very fair and unbiased picture painted of the situation showing both sides of the coin, where EA has reached out to a number of outlets to shoot down the claims of Dead Space 4 being canned (or to deny that a game they never announced was being canned).
The situation became so heated that EA's COO, Peter Moore, even went to the comment section of GameIndustry.biz to defend the company, saying...
Standard, shoddy website journalism recipe, born out of a desperate need to increase click-thru rates to support advertising revenue. Fabricate a story using an "unnamed source", post it first thing in the morning, add the letters" EA" to the story (oh, and link it to micro-transactions - always a fan favourite) and then stand back and enjoy the vitriol which you turn into revenue. Rinse and repeat...
Scratch. Lemon juice. Burn.
Videogamer.com has no remorse and is standing by their story. Some speculate that the anonymous insider is one of the angry individuals let go from Visceral Studios in Montreal that closed down [via Kotaku].
Nevertheless, EA may not like the hate they get from the community but they kind of put it on themselves. Publicly mentioning that they're going to add microtransactions to all their games will easily peeve off core gamers. Claiming that a game needs to sell five-million or go bust will also rub gamers the wrong way because it means it's all about doing whatever you can to sell the game and not actually focus on making it the best it can be.
There's a pretty big divide between what investors want and what gamers want and EA is going to have to learn to serve one master or another. Trying to serve both masters will only dig them into a deeper grave. As for Dead Space 4...well, the game that was never announced wasn't canceled. So I guess that's good?
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