According to an internal memo, EA has closed down Pandemic Studios, which was acquired together with BioWare in 2007. Pandemic Studios created games in the Star Wars: Battlefront and Mercenaries series and released Lord of the Rings: Conquest earlier this year. The Saboteur, the only confirmed project the studio was working on, will be finalized by the EA Montreal studio. Whether or not the game will still be released on December 8th as is currently planned remains uncertain. The fate of unannounced projects Pandemic was working on, is uncertain at this time. For more information, hit the jump.
The senior management team of Pandemic, along with roughly 200 other employees of Pandemic Studios were confirmed to have been let go as part of the closure, with most of the remaining team being allocated to EA Los Angeles, which is currently working on the PC-exclusive RTS Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. Over the past few months, EA has reduced the number of staff at various studios by roughly 1500.
Awww shit.
Damn, this was one of my favorite smaller developers, a shame to see them go. Wish they weren’t under EA’s “kill everything original, continue the franchise milking” banner, we are going to see a lot of this from the mega-publisher unfortunately.
Actually, I still have hopes for EA. Though they kill the studio itself, they are still developing and publishing some decent games that are pretty creative… Dead Space 2 is still coming, Dante’s Inferno and a Mirror’s Edge sequel hasn’t been ruled out either. Still, undoubtedly a shame