8 Dead EA Video Game Franchises That Deserve A Comeback

It's one of the many wonders of the world how EA continues to be the successful mega-publisher it is today. Ranging from distasteful (putting it mildly) monetisation methods to its infamous track record for putting the shutters on beloved studios like Visceral and Pandemic, hardly a month passes by without its PR department having to do damage control and explain why X game series failed to be successful and why we won't see it again for Y (read: a very long) amount of time.

Mistakes will be made, of course, and success is never guaranteed, but EA continues to sit on an ever-growing mountain of back catalogue titles that, despite their past successes, continue to be neglected like a public urinal due to one or a series of failures. Often, those have been a result of EA's own poor decisions - Dungeon Keeper Mobile's insulting freemium model and total ignorance of Command & Conquer's fan base, to name but two - but even success stories like Burnout and DICE's spin-off Battlefield series, Bad Company, go without sequels years after their last iteration dropped.

Management of a megacorporation goes beyond the expertise of this writer, but it's tough to see how if done with the proper love and respect, bringing back any of these wouldn't work in EA's favour, earning it some serious brownie points in the process.

We've waited long enough.

Deposed as the shmup king by Call of Duty's phenomenal rise to prominence in the late noughties, Medal of Honor proved incapable of keeping pace with its new competitor and has faded further into memory ever since. Eager to abandon its own IP at the first sign of trouble, EA discarded the franchise in favour of DICE's Battlefield to serve as its flagship shooter, and would only revisit the former years later.

2010's gritty quasi-reboot set during the Afghan War laid the groundwork for what could have been an excellent alternative to the increasingly outlandish warfare propagated by Modern Warfare and its successors, but then 2012's Warfighter came along and ruined any prospect of the two coexisting. Filled with bugs, a bad script and bland multiplayer, what should have been a more successful follow-up felt largely phoned in by comparison.

EA at least took the blame for Warfighter's poor quality, citing an "execution problem" as the major contributor to its failure and now, instead of attempting to right those wrongs, the entire franchise has been tragically left in stasis until God knows when. Probably until Battlefield's popularity inevitably runs dry and EA brings the cycle full circle by replacing DICE's shooter with yours truly.