Not more than a month after the release of Need For Speed: Undercover, the Electric Playground is reporting that Electronic Arts may be cutting the franchise entirely. The videogame web show claims that future titles in the series have been canceled. EA director of communications Colin Macrae provided Electric Playground with the following comment:
"We're working through a process on people, products, and facilities at EA and don't have any announcements today."
Undercover, the most recent entry in the long-running franchise, was received fairly well but didn't crack the top 20 in the NPD sales charts for the month of November. Earlier in the year, EA CEO John Riccitiello had spoken of plans to split the Need for Speed development team into two groups, allowing for a 24-month cycle for creating each game rather than the 12 months cycle that he said "torture[d] a very talented group of people."
If this report is true, I'm disappointed that we'll never get the chance to see what could have come from giving this series a much-needed boost in development time to try out new ideas. And unless the publisher already has new plans for the creators of Need For Speed, we could be seeing further layoffs from EA soon, as has been previously predicted. We'll keep checking for official confirmation and word from EA on what's happening to the Need for Speed franchise and why.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks