Hits now come from games given time ”to get to quality,” not licensed and ‘creatively limiting’ IPs. It’s why EA ”dumped” James Bond eventually.
”If you want to make a hit, you have to give a game time to get to quality,” said Gibeau. ”The days of licensed-based, 75-rated games copies are dead like the dinosaur.” For years EA released a number of videogames based of licensed IPs like James Bond.
”We dumped that licence because we felt like we needed to own more intellectual property, and we don’t like where James Bond is going with all the creative limitations on it.”
”Considering the total amount of money we have to spend on those types of James Bond games, and the total amount of man-hours we had to put into them, we thought; hell, let’s work on our own IP,” continued the EA boss.
”The guys who made James Bond games for us, well yeah, they went on and made Dead Space. And look where we are now; what would you rather publish, retail and play - the latest James Bond or Dead Space 2?”
Dead Space has earned itself a lot of fans with many eager to get a hold of the next instalment which is due out early next year for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The latest James Bond game from Activision meanwhile has not set the fan base ablaze.
Now comic book IPs are another matter - look at Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. As the title wasn’t based on the Christopher Nolan films they could get creative, and so they did, earning huge accolades being defined as ‘the’ comic-based videogame.
