14 DAY TRIAL // EA had a nice 3 years-long relationship with Marvel - the latter kept giving small little gifts to EA but the giants threw them all away. First, Cryptic Studios received the Marvel U MMO for a short time before being stalled. Then, EA Chicago got another nice little gift from Marvel called Marvel Nemesis, but it was "Imperfect" (no pun intended), so the whole studio had to close its doors and 146 people lost their jobs. Now, it seems that Marvel wants to end the relationship with Electronic Arts - they got tired of giving all these gifts and receiving nothing in exchange.
"EA and Marvel have jointly agreed to discontinue development of the Marvel titles under the EA Games Label. This was a business decision based on EA's portfolio strategy," an Electronic Arts rep declared to GameTap. The same declaration was made by Marvel. It just seems that nobody really wants to talk about it more than they should.
If you still remember, about the same thing happened back in the late 90s when Marvel had a quick affair with Capcom and a little baby boy resulted: Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes. Then, EA showed up and Marvel fell in love, as the latter's CEO Allen Lipson declared back in 2004: "It's a tremendous opportunity for EA to create new characters for fighting games that can be exploited through our global merchandise licensing machine to fuel sales in many other product categories."
Still, Marvel's decision to say good-bye to Electronic Arts (or the joint agreement, as both companies say) will not affect Marvel's ongoing plans to release fighting games based on its properties in the future. As you probably know, the company has a deal with Activision which had a great result called Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Hopefully, there will be a sequel. But quick, or else Marvel will break up with them, too.