The year began with unconfirmed rumors that The Lord of the Rings: The White Council had been canceled. The open-world role-playing game, which had been unveiled last summer, was slated for a holiday 2007 release on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. It was to be the latest game from Electronic Arts based on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-selling fantasy novels. Today, during a postearnings call, EA CFO Warren Jenson confirmed that The White Council is not canceled–but that work on it has been indefinitely suspended. “The Lord of the Rings product is back in development in terms of being on hold,” he cryptically told an analyst who asked whether or not the game had been canceled outright. [More]