5 Years Since The Cancellation of Command & Conquer (2013)

After two happy anniversaries in a row, there is a third one that is still bitter. On this day 5 years ago, on 29 October 2013 to be exact, the live service titled simply Command & Conquer and originally announced as just a separate game called C&C Generals 2, was cancelled, and its development studio Victory Games was closed, ending a 10-year span of an RTS studio situated in EA‘s Los Angeles building.

From the get-go, the game suffered from numerous development issues, starting from the Frostbite engine that is notoriously difficult to develop non-shooter games for, through Victory Games’ compromises to EA when it came to monetization and sacrificing campaigns at launch just to keep the studio and the game afloat, all the way to poor game design decisions that were only starting to get resolved very late in development, with game-changing patches scheduled, ironically, for the day it was cancelled and several months after that. To add an entire bag of salt to injury, Victory Games was ordered to post up a pre-written cancellation message that was regarded by one of their developers as “total bs”, even though they were supposed to roll out a major update that same day.

This also stands as the 5 year anniversary since the cancellation of the last known serious attempt at making a Command & Conquer game, and was seen as just the culmination of EA‘s catastrophic management of the franchise that started since C&C Arena’s shift to Tiberian Twilight in 2009. While we were spared an undercooked semiproduct, we had also lost all hope to see a completely new C&C title at all (let alone a good one), at least until the recent remaster announcement.