It’s been suggested that over the past decade, complications around licensing the likenesses of the world’s biggest boxers – and the increasingly high fees for doing so – had encouraged EA to focus on UFC, with which it could agree on a blanket deal for all its athletes. The Fight Night series, which last saw a release with 2011’s Fight Night Champion, had been consistently well-received by critics, with all five of its instalments earning Metacritic scores in the mid-to-high 80s.

Not much is currently known about the new boxing game, but it’s understood that EA sees the revival as a means of reasserting itself in the fighting game market.Īsked for comment on this story, an Electronic Arts spokesperson pointed to the company’s policy of not responding to “rumours and speculation.” Fight Night Champion was released in 2011. “We’re very excited about UFC 5 and… we want to eliminate the split focus that several members of our leadership team have had over the past while so we can solely focus on delivering migration and UFC 5 at high quality,” it reads. Thus the decision has been made to pause the game’s development “for the time being” to ensure that UFC 5 will be delivered at “high quality”, the email reads. The e-mail explained that strong marketplace competition had made it challenging to staff up for Fight Night, which was intended to enter production alongside UFC, and that it did not want to split its senior creatives between two fighting game projects.

In a studio-wide e-mail seen by VGC, EA Canada told staff that its focus would be on EA Sports UFC 5 for the foreseeable future.

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