They all share similar stories. Ragtag was a project sunk by many factors, including a lack of resources, a vision that was too ambitious for its budget, a difficult game engine, a director who clashed with staff, a studio located in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a reputation for toxicity, multiple conflicts between Visceral and EA, and what can only be described as the curse of Star Wars.

EA, for its part, also disputes the notion that it killed Ragtag for being single-player. “This truly isn’t about the death of single-player games—I love single-player, by the way—or story and character-driven games,” said Sцderlund. “Storytelling has always been part of who we are, and single-player games will of course continue. This also isn’t about needing a game that monetizes in a certain way. Those are both important topics, but that’s not what this is. At the end of the day, this was a creative decision. Our job is to give people a deep enough experience and story, and it’s also to push the boundaries forward. We just didn’t think we were getting it quite right.”

The third Dead Space disappointed many fans, and it was a commercial flop for EA, failing to hit the company’s lofty sales expectations. “Dead Space 3 came in below our forecast,” an EA executive said during an earnings call in May 2013. The company did not give out specific numbers, but by some estimates, a Dead Space game would have needed to sell five million copies just to break even.

As cool as it may have sounded, Yuma was ill-fated from the start. Battlefield Hardline was going through too many problems, and throughout 2014, progress on Yuma slowed to a crawl as Visceral asked all of its employees to help out on the cop game. Switching from third-person action-adventure games to a first-person shooter had been a rough adjustment for many people at Visceral, sources said, and a lot of them still didn’t actually want to make Hardline. Morale had sunk at the studio by then, and Visceral was already losing key artists and engineers who weren’t interested in working on the game. “EA does internal health surveys,” said one person who worked on the game. “Throughout most of Hardline’s production, Visceral had the worst team health survey at EA, for like two years running.”

Everyone I asked about Ragtag’s story was unanimous about one thing: They all thought it was awesome. The lead protagonist was Dodger, described as a “cracked mirror version” of Han Solo, and over the course of the game he’d battle alongside a band of fellow misfits like Robie, a gunslinger and Dodger’s partner in crime; Oona, the daughter of a mob boss; and Buck, the veteran leader and mentor of the crew. Set between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Ragtag would focus on the impact of Alderaan’s destruction and tell a story about criminal families, scoundrels, and action-packed heists. “This was the coolest shit I’ve ever seen,” said one person who saw the story. “[Hennig] had total buy-in from the start on that. Everybody was buzzing.”