EA closes studio and scraps "Black Panther" game

Electronic Arts is cutting more jobs: The Cliffhanger Games studio is being closed, reports the games magazine IGN based on an internal email from EA manager Laura Miele. It is not known how many people are affected.

Cliffhanger Games was founded to develop an action game about the Marvel superhero "Black Panther". This game is also being scrapped, writes Miele in her email. It was announced in 2023 as an "innovative action adventure" with a single-player focus. Apart from a logo, there was no sign of the game.

Several veterans from well-known developer studios worked at Cliffhanger Games, including from the 'Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor' studio Monolith Productions, which was also closed at the beginning of the year. According to the announcement from summer 2023, Cliffhanger employees were also involved in high-profile games such as 'Halo Infinite', 'God of War' and 'Call of Duty'.

Further job cuts

According to IGN, EA is also laying off employees from other studios, including the mobile team, in addition to the Cliffhanger employees. These job cuts follow several waves of redundancies in recent months. Just at the beginning of the month, EA confirmed redundancies at racing game developer Codemasters, which EA had only bought for 1.2 billion US dollars in 2021. A new "Titanfall" game at Respawn Entertainment was also discontinued. As part of these restructuring measures, EA is said to have laid off between 300 and 400 employees in total, Bloomberg reported.

EA justifies the latest job cuts with an increased focus on its core formats. The aim is to sharpen the focus and bundle the creative energy behind the most important growth drivers, IGN quotes from the email from manager Miele. As with previous redundancies, developers will be provided the opportunity to move within EA. EA has already removed employees from role-playing game studio Bioware to work on EA's sports games.

(dahe)