This week, EA canceled a nascent video game based on the Marvel superhero Black Panther and closed the developer behind it, Cliffhanger Studios.
It was the latest move in an ongoing reorganization at the game publisher, which has also
gutted BioWare, canceled projects at Respawn and laid off
hundreds of employees this year. In an email to staff seen by Bloomberg News, President of EA Entertainment and Technology Laura Miele wrote that these decisions were made "to sharpen our focus and put our energy behind the most significant growth opportunities."
"Looking ahead over the next couple of years, we're focusing on what we believe will have the biggest impact —
Battlefield,
The Sims,
Skate, and
Apex Legends — and continuing to invest in blockbuster storytelling with
Iron Man and the third installment of the
Jedi series," she continued. "Our mobile business also remains a meaningful part of our future."
In recent months, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson has said that EA plans to divest from licensed games in favor of its own properties. But this week, a representative for the company told IGN that EA will continue making at least three more Marvel games, including
Iron Man, in the
years to come.
So what was
Black Panther, and why did it get canceled?
The news came as a shock to many Cliffhanger employees, according to people familiar with this week's events. Cliffhanger was actively hiring staff, and
Black Panther had recently passed what EA calls a "gate" — a development milestone where executives review a game's progress and decide whether to continue production. The team had momentum, and the project was coalescing, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.
Others familiar with the project told me that EA executives were frustrated that the game had not yet left the pre-production phase after nearly four years in development.
As EA assessed its portfolio earlier this year, it eliminated some of the projects that had been in development for a long time but had made the least amount of progress, including incubation projects at Respawn and this
Black Panther game. A representative for EA declined to comment on the cancellation.
One reason for the slow progress on
Black Panther was that the studio had only just begun scaling up. Many of the workers laid off this week were hired less than a year ago, including some who only joined in the last few weeks and months, said the people familiar.
Cliffhanger was founded in 2021 by a group of video-game developers who had led Monolith Productions, the Kirkland, Washington-based game studio behind the breakout hit
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel. When their follow-up project, a new franchise code-named
Legacy, was
canceled by Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., they left to start a new studio with EA.
The highlight of
Shadow of Mordor was the Nemesis System, which allowed certain orcs to develop traits and personalities based on the player's actions throughout the game. For
Black Panther, Cliffhanger was building a new system that would expand on those ideas.
The plan, according to the people familiar with the game's development, was to feature various playable heroes from the comic-book universe, such as T'Challa, Killmonger and Shuri, all competing for the mantle of Black Panther, which would grant superhuman strength. The player would take control of one of these heroes, while the others would become rivals with whom the player could cultivate relationships.
The heroes would be allied against an opposing force of aliens called the Skrulls, shapeshifters from the comic books and movies, that were attempting to invade the African nation of Wakanda. Some Skrulls could have been impostors posing as allies; others might have remembered the player's behavior and acted accordingly, sort of like in
Shadow of Mordor.
It was an ambitious system, and early prototypes and builds of the game were designed to demonstrate to developers and EA executives how it might function, said the people familiar with the state of its development. After passing the latest EA gate in March, the team's next big milestone was a vertical slice, or a chunk of the game built to show the level of graphical fidelity that it would aim to hit.
But procedural narrative experiments were hard to showcase to executives. The team had been moving slowly due to an elongated ideation period and also the struggles of simultaneously building a game and a studio, said people familiar with the title's challenges. It didn't help, the people said, that Cliffhanger was based in Kirkland, Washington, an expensive city that would need to pay top salaries, especially now that EA has
put an end to remote hiring.
The closure may mark an end for big-budget games using the Nemesis system or narrative experiments like it. Just three months ago, Warner Bros.
shut down Monolith, which had been working on a
Wonder Woman game that had also experimented with the Nemesis system.
Last fall during
EA's investor day, Miele raved about
Black Panther, calling it a "love letter to fans" with "all new technology delivering groundbreaking design and storytelling that will actually transfer across many games and studios in our company."
In the end, the game just wasn't far enough along for EA, despite recent momentum. On Wednesday, Cliffhanger employees were abruptly told to attend an all-hands meeting. Then 30 minutes later, they were told that
Black Panther was canceled and that the studio was shutting down before ever releasing a game.
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