Single-player is the vestigial limb of publishers that had to adapt or die

At some point last century, someone at the U.S. Department of Defense plugged a network cable into a computer. Cut to a few decades later, and Electronic Arts says it is canning a game because it doesn’t function as an online service. The publisher announced yesterday that it is closing Dead Space developer Visceral and canceling its linear, single-player Star Wars game. We talked about this bombshell news on the GamesBeat Decides podcast this week, and you can hear that by clicking play on the video above.

EA is rebooting the Star Wars project, which has the codename Ragtag, with its Vancouver studio leading production. The rumors are that Ragtag was in trouble, and EA — and potentially even Disney — wasn’t happy. If that’s true, EA faced a few choices: It could cancel the game completely, try to save it as is with Visceral, or rework it as something less risky. EA went with the third option. It has the Star Wars license, and it had to decide how it was going to invest its resources going forward to get the most from the brand. In the end, EA decided that completely reworking it as a service-based game was a less risky way to spend that money than trying to save a messy, linear single-player adventure.