The founder and CEO of Slightly Mad Studios has lobbed fresh mud at Electronic Arts after the publishing giant announced plans to cancel the Project CARS franchise.
Ian Bell, who left the company in October 2021, took to Twitter overnight and didn’t pull any punches in his criticism towards EA, commenting:
EA, keeping on being awesome… I said my bit and I stand by every word as they continue to prove them. How are those numbers (sorry I mean people, with hopes, dreams and families) looking, at the bottom of those the spreadsheets?
EA announced yesterday that it would be shelving the Project CARS franchise after evaluating its driving game output going forward. This still leave a number of key franchises under its belt, including Codemasters’ Formula One franchise, GRID and WRC.
Bell has previously made his feelings about EA clear during a 2017 interview with YouTube’s SpotTheOzzie.
We had made a game called Need for Speed: Shift, we had made a game called Shift 2, and EA came to me and said, two months into Shift 2, can we give you 1.5 million if you agree not to talk to any other publishers, to agree any other games, or work on any other arrangement with any other publisher, and we’ll give you 1.5 million and we’ll sign Shift 3?
So, I said OK, that sounds like a good deal. I took the 1.5 million, I paid the guys loads of bonuses, and two weeks before we were due to start Shift 3 they cancelled it with no warning. They said ‘we are not doing that anymore’.
[Source – VGC]