9 Amazing Video Game Developers Killed Off By Their Publishers
1. Visceral Games
Founded: 1998
Defunct: 2017
What happened: A combination of mismanagement, corporate clashes and a dangerous lack of foresight all contributed to Visceral's heart-breaking demise last year.
The whole sorry story is too rich to tell here - Kotaku's Jason Schreier has done a terrific job on that front - but suffice it to say, the studio's degeneration began with the commercial failure of Dead Space 3.
The once-critically acclaimed survival horror was perceived to have betrayed its roots with the action-oriented co-op threequel. EA subsequently put the brakes on and assigned Visceral to Battlefield Hardline, a first-person shooter that the studio had no experience or interest in making.
That was the second red flag. The third came in the form of Visceral's unreleased follow-up single-player Star Wars game, made possible by EA's acquisition of the license.
Only, a haemorrhaging of staff, mandatory use of DICE's Frostbite engine (built specifically for FPS') and a lack of support on EA's end made the task an exhausting nightmare.
From day one, it expected Visceral to achieve the impossible.
"EA executives are like, 'FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.' Where's your version of that?"
Speechless.