EA say that the decision to close Visceral Games had nothing to do with the publisher’s move away from single player games.
Visceral’s Star Wars game would have been a gritty heist story.
In a financial earnings call yesterday, Andrew Wilson was asked to comment on the closure of the studio, and said that a combination of player feedback and market trends contributed to the change of direction that EA eventually took.
Wilson says “During the development process of the game that they were working on, we’ve been testing the game content with players, listening to their feedback in terms of what and how they wanted to play and really tracking that closely with fundamental shifts in the marketplace and we are seeing an evolution in the marketplace.”
Wilson goes on to say “it became clear to us that to deliver the experience that players wanted to come back and enjoy for a long time, that we needed to pivot the design,” but that change wasn’t due to discussions over the future of single-player games. He says “You may have heard the conversation around single player versus multiplayer or single player versus live service and this wasn’t about that conversation. It wasn’t about this was just a single-player game or it needed to be a live service, it was more about how do we get to a point where the overall gameplay experience was right for players.”