EA cancels Motive's new IP Gaia after six years of development

Title was scrapped during an internal review.

Electronic Arts has apparently canned a project code-named Gaia that its Motive studio had been working on for several years.

That's according to Bloomberg, which says that the game was cancelled after six years. Apparently, development had been "turbulent" and the game had been rebooted at least once. Gaia being cancelled was seemingly due to EA re-evaluating the resources it is allocating to projects, likely the same process that resulted in Anthem Next being scrapped.

During last year's EA Play E3 broadcast, the company's chief studios officer Laura Miele said that Motive was working on “a highly ambitious, innovative new game that puts the power and creativity in your hands.” Little else is known about what Gaia would have been, but a brief bit of work in progress gameplay footage appears here.

“We have a deep and robust pipeline of new content with more than 35 new games in various levels of incubation and development,” EA spokesperson John Reseburg said.

Montreal-based EA Motive was founded back in 2015 when Ubisoft vet Jade Raymond joined Electronic Arts. The studio apparently worked on Visceral's Star Wars game, Project Ragtag, before that title was cancelled at the end of 2017.

In 2015, reports emerged that Motive was also working on a game in the style of Assassin's Creed. This could well have been Gaia. Last year, the studio released its first title in Star Wars Squadrons, a game we described as "EA’s smallest scale Star Wars title yet – but also its best" in our review.

Despite the positive critical reception, EA Motive has said that users shouldn't expect post-launch content for Squadrons, but the firm rolled out a new map and two new fighters for the game the month after it launched.