According to Videogamer, EA has cancelled Dead Space 4 and buried the franchise for good. Their inside source, someone familiar with the project claims EA canned Dead Space 4 during the pre-production stage, due to poor Dead Space 3 sales.
Last year, EA had publically issued an enormous target to developer Visceral Games who had to make sure the game sold 5 million copies for the franchise to survive. That probably didn’t happen, since Dead Space 3 wasn’t that great.
Videogamer’s source also claims that the reason Dead Space 3 lacked genuine scares was because EA forced Visceral to dumb down the game to enable micro-transactions, and make it far more action oriented to appeal to today’s gamer.
EA hasn’t issued an official statement yet, so kindly take this with a pinch of salt.