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The DeanBeat: What Visceral’s closing means for video games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

The video game industry received a shock to the system this week as Electronic Arts rebooted its story-based Star Wars game and shut down Visceral Games, a studio that made some beefy blockbusters like Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline.

EA said that it was moving Star Wars project from Visceral to another studio in Canada, and it would do what it could to place the 70 employees of Visceral in other jobs. EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund said that the game industry is evolving faster and more dramatically than ever before, and those changes had an impact on the Star Wars game that Visceral was making, led by Uncharted creator Amy Hennig.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.