The ”innovation, and the action” resides in connectivity and studios need to ‘collaborate’ between what’s ”critically acclaimed and commercially successful”.
“I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads, they’ll tell you the same thing,” said Frank Gibeau. ”They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out.”
“It’s about collaboration – looking at being both critically acclaimed and commercially successful,” he said. There has to be an online component.
“It’s both, and I like to give studios a lot of creative autonomy, and that’s certainly proven by the types of games we’ve brought out over the last couple of years.”
”I mean, EA used to be against M-rated content,” he continued. ”Go check out Dead Space. It’s one of my core cultural studio values to allow developers to decide more on what they want to build. And a studio’s creative call needs to be balanced against a commercial imperative, and if you look at online these days – that’s the place to be.”
”What I learned early on in my career was that, if you’re going to lead a creative team, you have to inspire people,” he added. ”They’re the ones living in the game.”
EA is offline phobic these days - just look at releases like BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, they’re both singleplayer but each are ‘connected’ still. There’ll be no The Witcher 2 type projects coming from EA any time soon.
