Motive has announced the sandbox adventure Gaia has been cancelled after more than 5 years of working on the project. EA faced an internal review this year- and is seeing some big changes in both staff and projects. This comes after news earlier this week that the developer has also cancelled it’s online action-RPG Anthem, leaving fans concerned that the company is struggling more than they let on.
Gaia was announced last year at EA Play with a tiny tease of the game play, though the game wasn’t named outright. It was already five years in the making, but the clip was extremely limited and in very early stages. The game had never been formally announced aside from a teaser in 2015 that Motive had new things in development. In 2018 Gaia lost its main directors, leaving them to reboot the game a few years into the project.
This is becoming a habit for EA. The company announced the cancellation of their Star Wars game, code-named Viking, last year. After Disney acquired the rights to the franchise, EA signed an agreement becoming the sole publisher using the license and struggled with the title thereafter. BioWare most recently cancelled Anthem’s update, coined Anthem Next, stating they plan to push forward with some of their bigger game titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Fans are left questioning EA entirely after reports of lost staff leave them concerned that something big is going on internally at the company. People are speculating that EA won’t be announcing any large new projects soon, and are declaring that they are losing confidence in the company as a whole. Both EA and Motive are being called out. Hopefully EA can pull fans back in by working on their more popular titles for release on the next-gen systems, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
