Cancelled > Flop

I'm very late to the party, but I'm sure you won't have a problem with me pouring one out for the hundreds of people EA recently laid-off, most notably 100+ at Respawn.

• I Wrote That May 11th, 2025

Last year we heard about a cancelled "Titanfall Legends" Single Player Game, and now we're hearing about the 100+ people laid off being attached to a cancelled Titanfall Extraction Shooter. Both of these projects were presumably considered because "Titanfall 3" just wouldn't sell based upon the figures of previous games, even after it's become gaming's "Half Life 3". A name that were it to be announced on Twitter in a JPG, would generate thousands of headlines on gaming news sites to millions of individual viewers.

Based on Titanfall's previous sales, according to EA, Titanfall 3 just wouldn't sell.

We have to make it an Apex Campaign instead.

We have to make an Extraction Shooter instead.

…well, clearly we don't have to because on both occasions, we didn't. On both occasions, we cancelled the projects outright. Instead of delivering a game to millions of players but not enough millions of players to justify the cost spent developing the game for those millions of players, we funded and developed to games that were delivered to…

Zero players.

I am stuck.

I've got a spinning hamster wheel for a brain that's going round and round in circles reading this story. There's a crumb between my teeth I've been digging at for hours, and I just can't pinch it free.

Why is a flop game considered worse than a cancelled game?

Some might say that it isn't, that both are considered failures by the bosses funding said failures, but that's what the actions of companies like EA are saying about their franchises like Titanfall. When 2017's landmark sequel doesn't make the return EA were hoping for (we're not even going to delve into the many self-inflicted reasons this occurred), what happens?

EA does not permit the next game to be made.

Yet when a "Titanfall Legends" Campaign gets canned in the middle of development, what happens?

EA does permit the next game to be made… and then cancels that next game too.

I feel like I'm going insane. You funded the money to build a ship, hire a crew, set it to Sea across the Atlantic, and received confirmation that it reached the destination! But the Post-Card they sent wasn't pretty enough, so you don't pay for their next venture.

You instead fund the money to build a ship, hire a crew, only to set it on fire halfway through building it, and then do that exact same thing again! I'm missing something… I have to be! Because this doesn't make any sense from any perspective. Not in art, not in business, not even in one's pride!

The obvious elephant in the room is Apex Legends. This game was an overnight success, and Titanfall never was, and if there's anything I've learned from the industry, it's that you will move the Heavens before they stop chasing the dragon.

It took twenty years and a mass-grave of studios before publishers finally stopped trying to dethrone World of Warcraft…

It took enough years for Halo to fall from dominance before publishers finally stopped trying to make its killer…

It took more than both of these examples for publishers to stop adding a fucking mini-game to every fucking franchise under the sun!

Once EA got a taste of PUBG or Warzone's success, they would fund anything and everything remotely related to it to get a rush of that Cocaine bucket again.  I recall Ken Levine saying something to the effect of the only reason he was able to do what he did with Bioshock Infinite, was because he was attached to Bioshock, a game that sold 5 Million Copies.

Once you get a publisher high, then you can maybe do the shit you want to… if it's not too crazy.

Titanfall never achieved that high for EA, so it was never going to get that permission. No matter how fiendish the fanbase might be, their eagerness for a new installment being so contagious it borders on being a plague, one that spreads every time Titanfall 2 goes on-sale for $5, EA aren't infected, so they don't care.

It's hardly just EA doing this.

The Last of Us, Spiderman, Deus Ex, Disco Elysium, Timesplitters, and more all had new entries scrapped last year. Some of these games were in development for years. I personally know of a new Ubisoft title that had received 4-5 revisions over 4-5 years of development time, and it got cancelled last year.

This isn't just because then of Titanfall's lackluster performance (according to EA). It's happening everywhere.