When Electronic Arts closed down Visceral Games and announced that the studio`s in-development Star Wars game was changing directions significantly, some wondered if this had to do with the game`s more linear, single-player nature. Given the huge success of multiplayer games like Destiny and PUBG that use the games-as-a-service model, was EA re-tooling Visceral`s Star Wars game to respond to this industry trend? EA CEO Andrew Wilson said it wasn`t necessarily, but now EA CFO Blake Jorgensen has acknowledged that linear games are fading in popularity in the current market.`As we kept reviewing the game, it continued to look like a much more linear game [which] people don`t like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago,` Jorgensen said during the Credit Suisse Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this week (via DualShockers).For his part, Wilson said the decision to close Visceral and pivot the studio`s Star Wars game wasn`t about the game needing to have a live service element. `It wasn`t about, `This was just a single-player game [and 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,`` he explained earlier this month.Going back to Jorgensen, he said Visceral was trying to make a Star Wars game that `really pushed gameplay to the next level.` He also acknowledged that Visceral was a `sub-scale` studio, staffed by around 80 people which is on the smaller side for a AAA game made by EA. Because of this, EA brought in teams from Vancouver and Montreal to support Visceral on this project.EA ultimately decided to close Visceral and significantly shift the nature of the Star Wars game because `it was an economic decision at the end of the day.` Jorgensen thought about how many copies the game would have to sell and he determined that EA `probably wouldn`t be able to` reach that unspecified mark. `You gotta cut the bridge when you realise you can`t make a lot of m ...
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