According to more rumors, Visceral has been restructured, including the closing of Visceral Montreal. The pre-production for the fourth installment was apparently on the way at Visceral Montreal, but lower than expected sales for Dead Space 3 caused EA to cancel the fourth installment of the game.
From what we have been able to figure out, the future of the franchise is undetermined at best for the short term while EA sorts things out. Dead Space 3 has been the subject of many rumors during its production, which claims that EA made a number of “suggestions” in order to enhance the appeal of the game. We are still following the trail on this, so we are not sure exactly how much in trouble the third offering actually was during production.
EA is during a lot of restructuring in order to better leverage its talent pool as projects are shuffled around. We do think, however, that we have not heard the end of the Dead Space franchise; and it could be that EA will elect to work with another studio to deliver more of it.