EA, which loves to cancel Titanfall games, cancels secret Titanfall game

EA, which loves to cancel Titanfall games, cancels secret Titanfall game

In 2016, Electronic Arts published what may well be the last great big-budget shooter, Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall 2. The game, to quote a particularly NSFW Achewood, was James Bond in a towel: full of astoundingly intricate level design, fast and balletic movement, and incredibly satisfying gunplay. It was revelatory, a whole new kind of fun emerging from something a lot of players already enjoyed, like if Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 suddenly got a tango mod, or an NFL team put out a Christmas album. Then EA spent the next seven years doing everything it could to not make a sequel.

The latest affront comes via a Bloomberg report saying that EA has canceled a secret single-player game in the Titanfall/Apex Legends universe that was in development at Respawn. This would be the second time (that we know of) that a Titanfall sequel was canceled — the free-to-play battle royale game Apex Legends began its life as a Titanfall 2 follow-up.

There are likely boring business reasons for the cancellation. Titanfall 2 was a massive critical success, but EA didn’t consider it a financial hit — and unfortunately, just about any single-player game is going to struggle in comparison to a free-to-play game like Apex Legends, which has made more than $2 billion. None of this makes sense in what we’ll call Regular People Math: EA also continues to print money with the microtransaction-driven FIFA Ultimate Team mode (so much so that the company now omits that game’s revenue from its annual reports). And yet the publisher has just finished shutting down a few projects — including, yes, a Titanfall mobile game, Apex Legends Mobile.

“No more Titanfall sequels” is pretty low on the list of reasons that unchecked growth in big-budget video game profits is bad. But it’s not not on the list.

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