We now have further insight on why EA cancelled their game Marvel’s Black Panther, and shut down its studio, Cliffhanger Games.
EA confirmed this after an internal email leaked last week. At the time, we speculated that EA has been instituting layoffs in the company a few times this year because of lowering performance of their live service title, Apex Legends. But if this rumor is true, it’s possible that this could have all happened even if Apex Legends was continuing to do well.
Jason Schreier, reporting for Bloomberg, explained that Marvel’s Black Panther just passed a development milestone called a “gate.” This is a pivotal point in any game, as during the gate the company’s executives look at the work that has been done and decide if they will go forward with the project or not.
Unfortunately for Cliffhanger Games, EA’s executives were frustrated because Marvel’s Black Panther was already four years in development, but it still hadn’t finished pre-production. EA was currently in a process of reassessing its portfolio, and cancelling projects that were taking too long in development. They reportedly already cancelled incubation projects by Respawn as well, and that likely includes that project some were referring to as Titanfall 3.
Schreier also reported that Cliffhanger Games were upbeat about the project, as they believed it was coming together and that the team had momentum. They had also just started scaling up, meaning that at the time EA cancelled the game, they laid off people who had been hired for months and even just weeks before.
To put this in context, Monolith Productions, which had been in existence since 2004, took three years to develop Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. That was considerably less time than Cliffhanger Games was taking to make Marvel’s Black Panther. But of course, unlike Monolith, Cliffhanger Games was still being formed while they were making the game at the same time.
And we’re making this comparison because several staff who came from Monolith Productions went on to form Cliffhanger Games. It’s an unhappy turn of events that everyone who were in both studios have now lost their jobs.
It’s of course sad to know that there would be layoffs in any company. In this case, it’s also sad that Monolith’s Nemesis system may no longer be used by the developers who created it in any form anymore. WB Games holding the patent to the Nemesis system rings hollow now that they didn’t even retain the people who came up with it. Both the Wonder Woman game and Marvel’s Black Panther will now never exist to show us how that could have possibly looked like for superhero themed video games.
