Are we really pretending EA doesn't do this to every studio that shows a hint of profit decrease? It's been a major part of their business model for a decade or more.

I mean if its just playing it normally and not proper testing (run there and jump while spamming the inventory key until the game breaks kind of testing) then that's a pretty sweet deal

EA is not a believer in the sunk cost fallacy.

I'm a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).

They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.

This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There's an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn't like movie tie-ins one day.

There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.

Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.