It was Ben Cousins who tweeted this Stockholm fact, who used to work at EA but now resides at mobile game developer ngmoco. Recently EA Games said DICE wasn’t a ”Battlefield factory.”
For years a sequel to Mirror’s Edge has been rumoured to be getting resources spent on it over at DICE. While not selling well, EA admitted it was a promising new IP.
”It is general knowledge in the Stockholm dev scene that Mirror’s Edge 2 is in production at DICE”, tweeted Ben Cousins in response to EA Games vice president Patrick Soderlund stating that DICE wasn’t just about Battlefield. He was asked by OXM if it was hard to justify new blood like Mirror’s Edge when Battlefield paid off so well.
”Well it depends, right? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. It’s also important for us - the DICE guys are roughly 300 people in the Stockholm studio; not all of them are working on Battlefield things, and that’s intentional, because we don’t want to become a Battlefield factory,” VP Soderlund said.
”The minute we start saying ‘you’re going to make a Battlefield game for the rest of your life’, they’re going to go some place else. So for them to make great Battlefield games there need to be other things for them to do as well.”
”That’s why we have people who move around quite a bit. And then obviously we have a boatload of people that just want to make Battlefield because they love it,” he continued.
The EA boss said it applied to the likes of Dead Space’s creators: ”Same thing with the team in San Francisco that are making Dead Space. It’s a stunning team and they’re passionate about what they do, and they love making Dead Space. Then the answer’s ‘well, then make Dead Space’. Then we have to figure out how to sell it and make it successful.”
EA has never hidden their desire to bring Mirror’s Edge back to market. The first-person freerunner IP suffered terribly in sales as it was crushed by well known franchises at the time of launch. Back in October 2011, Patrick Liu of DICE said the time was about right for Mirror’s Edge to return.