In conjunction with announcing company-wide layoffs totaling 1,500 employees, publisher Electronic Arts also revealed it has canceled several unannounced projects.

During the company's financial investor call this afternoon, CEO John Riccitiello gave a bleak outlook to many "risk" titles fans were hopeful for release in the next couple years. When asked by an analyst where the reduction in work force would reflect its current crop of projects, Riccitiello responded by saying the company had decided to cut over a dozen still unannounced titles, and added the company is focusing on guaranteed hits going forward in this struggling economy."Electronic Arts has a core slate of games labels and sports franchises that we will iterate on an annual or bi-annual basis," he explained. "All of them are selling or have sold in their most recent edition 2 million units or more.





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"After that, we've got the Sims and Hasbro, and frankly anything that doesn't measure up to looking like it can pencil out to be a very high profit contributor and high unit seller got cut from our title slate from this point going forward," he added.



"If you could array our titles slate up knowing what we did about what we would have otherwise brought to market, we cut the bottom third of it."



This probably isn't good news for fans hoping for a Mirror's Edge sequel.



Riccitiello expressed enthusiasm over the Dead Space and Spore franchises at DICE 2009 this past February, but didn't speak too kindly about Mirror's Edge, saying the game underperformed financially, but added "we can learn from that and make it better."



This is also bad news for the rumored Road Rash project, as well as hopeful sequels to Dead Space Extraction for Wii and SSX.



