Beamer wrote on Feb 11, 2013, 08:19:
Read between the lines here.

Epic releases tech demos for their engine every so often. Without fail, they've become games.
Cliff left Epic. The 2011 has not become an announced game.

Likely answer: it was a sign of a game in development, they were having trouble with the development, game was possibly canceled and Cliff quit, having been drained, or Cliff quit, having been drained, and game was then canceled.

We know Epic has one team working on FortNite, which I think is probably a smaller team than the Gears game got. So that leaves a good chunk of their staff working on something else. I'd figured it was whatever that demo was, looking at a 2014 release date on the new consoles, but maybe it's DOA and maybe they don't have as much in the pipeline as I would have expected.

Rod, Mike and Cliff all left. Probably something fairly traumatic behind it. A "doozy" could connect some of those dots.