Rumour: EA mothballs Dead Space after poor sales

Dead Space 4's development has been stopped in its tracks after the series' latest outing failed to meet sales targets, according to a secret source.

Speaking to Videogamer.com, the anonymous source said that the limp sales of Dead Space 3 have led to the move, which sees Dead Space 4 pre-production halted at Visceral Games.

Publisher EA visited Visceral's Montreal-branch last month to tell the staff that the project has been mothballed, with rumours circling that the studio has since closed its doors.

While the publisher has yet to confirm that this action has been taken, EA recently canned the Medal of Honor franchise for similar reasons.

Citing lower than expected sales results, the company explained that the war franchise had been taken "out of rotation".

Likewise, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau previously stated that Dead Space 3 would need to sell 5 million copies in order to justify its continued existence.

"In general we're thinking about how we make this a more broadly appealing franchise, because ultimately you need to get to audience sizes of around five million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space," he told CVG last summer.

"Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them."

Our own review suggested that the latest game had veered from what made the originally popular, with reviewer Bracken Keysell commenting: "Dead Space 3 is an awkward game. It re-invents itself a little, sacrificing some of the elements that made the series a success."

James Lee

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James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.