Network now...NEWS
EA Cans Tiberium
By Kris Graft
September 30, 2008
See also:
Related Articles:
"Moving forward, we need to make sure this doesn't happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised."
EA's renewed quality targets have claimed a high-profile casualty.
On Tuesday, the company confirmed to Edge that the squad-based shooter Tiberium has been cancelled.
"EA has suspended work on Tiberium effective immediately ... The game was not on track to meet the high quality standards set by the team and by the EA Games label," said EA spokesperson Mariam Sughayer in an e-mail.
"A lower quality game is not in the best interest of the consumers and would not succeed in this market," she added.
The game was set in EA's popular Command & Conquer universe.
An internal EA memo from EALA's Mike Verdu first appeared on Kotaku which further outlined the reasons behind the cancellation. EA confirmed that the memo is "legit."
"Moving forward, we need to make sure this doesn't happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised," Verdu wrote. He met personally with the Tiberium team this morning.
Verdu said in the memo that he, EA Games general manager Nick Earl and EA Games president Frank Gibeau came to the mutual decision to stop work on Tiberium.
Verdu added that "several" employees will be released, but the company will try to place affected staffers on other projects within EA. Sughayer would not disclose exactly how many were let go.
Eligible workers who were laid off will receive a severance package and outplacement support.
EA LA is home to other EA operations including EA Mobile, EA Casual and EA's Global Online group.
The location is also where EA is developing Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, a series of Steven Spielberg titles and other unannounced titles.
"The game had fundamental design challenges from the start," Verdu explained. "We fought to correct the issues, but we were not successful; the game just isn't coming together well enough to meet our own quality expectations as well as those of our consumers."
EA CEO John Riccitiello said recently that the company aims to have a Metacritic average score of over 80 percent by fiscal 2011.
I find EA's renewed quality targets a little confusing at this point since Tiberium doesn't seem too out of place from the publisher's current crop of titles if the previews are anything to go by. There must have been some serious issues under the hood then.
"it's basically nothing short of total affirmation regarding EA's inability to make quality games outside of their sports franchises"
No, RELEASING it would have been such an affirmation.
Kudos to EA for making a difficult decision and coming down on the side of their customers.
No, releasing it would've done nothing but allow them to recoup at least some of money already invested in Tiberium. that's how this business works. i don't know if you're aware of this but games in this day and age cost tens of millions to produce. and you don't walk away from one that's been in development for two years just because you don't want your feelings hurt by a couple of potential low scores. unless, as i stated earlier, it was so poorly made that it bordered on incompetent. which means the last thing anyone's doing is giving them "kudos". you think the project manager's responsible for Tiberium were given "kudos" over this? that wasn't Monopoly money they were playing with.
you want to give "kudos" to a child for deciding to start over from scratch. not an industry-leading, 26 year-old, multi-billion dollar company that's charging at least $60 for their products.
Good riddance, time for a proper Renegade 2 then, made by Dice or so.
EA's BLACK tottally kicked ass!
that's embarrassing. this is the same company that's been in this business and sitting at the top for almost 30 years now? i'd hate to be the one explaining this to investors.
it's basically nothing short of total affirmation regarding EA's inability to make quality games outside of their sports franchises (and even that's not saying much). that's the only way to look at this.
it's commendable (from a financial stance) that they had balls to kill it after so much already invested but considering how low EA's real standards are to begin with, this game must've been found to give cancer.
it's frustrating to see this company release mediocre to sub-mediocre games time and again (Black, Army of 2, Battlefield:BC, Mercs2) with the resources at their disposal, while there are developers out there accomplishing more with so much less.
maybe if they focused more effort on the game itself than it's marketing we'd all be enjoying the results. im looking at you Dead Space.
Metacritic average or over 80%????
Good luck. They need ALOT of good games to overcome the ATROCIOUS ones. *cough* Need for Speed *cough*