Electronic Arts' Tiberium Shot Down

Electronic Arts has cancelled Tiberium, its first-person shooter based in the Command & Conquer universe. Quality issues have been cited.

An internal memo from Mike Verdu, general manager of EALA, explained, "The game had fundamental design challenges from the start. We fought to correct the issues, but we were not successful; the game just isn't coming together well enough to meet our own quality expectations as well as those of our consumers."

An EA representative further stated, "A lower quality game is not in the best interest of the consumers and would not succeed in this market."

Some staff will lose jobs as a result of the cancellation, although EA has said that it will relocate them where possible.

Tiberium had already been in development for around a year, but had been pushed back from this Autumn to late on next year.

Verdu's memo also contained a warning for future development - "Moving forward, we need to make sure this doesn't happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised. Now we need to step up our focus on great design and execution, catching any problems early and correcting them quickly."

On the bright side, it's encouraging that EA would rather can a project than have an inferior game ship to retail. Assuming of course that this is, in fact, the result of not meeting quality expectations rather than all that crunching credit and the imminent demise of capitalism.

^{Sources: Wall Street Journal
Kotaku}