Electronic Arts may have earned some gamer cred last year for being ballsy enough to publish new intellectual properties like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, but some people at the company think it might have gone a tad overboard.
Oh, this topsy turvy world in which we live, where Electronic Arts is the new symbol of the heroic and brave company which is big in size and vision as well, daring to publish new IPs in an age bereft with sequelitis. The mission to put out artistically respectable and high quality products that are as original as they are profitable is supposedly one of the new company lines at EA, but some folks at the company think it might need some reeling back.
“I’m not the kind of guy that ever looks back,” EA Games boss Frank Gibeau told Gamasutra. “I look back long enough to learn a few things, and then apply them going forward. But I think that we launched too many new IPs all at once in [fiscal] Q3 [the holiday quarter].”
Gibeau says that EA didn’t give itself enough time to market and build “assets” like fan communities to establish lasting demand, and that he “probably would have” chosen a different release windows for Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge. The former performed well with critics and consumers, while the latter received a mixed response and performed disappointingly in terms of sales.
Nevertheless, last year’s brave new adventure in being The New EA was a learning experience, Gibeau thinks. “With new IPs, we learned a lot about how to launch them and how to create them,” he said. Gibeau expects EA to launch two to three new IPs a year from now on.
Published: Jun 5, 2009 06:03 pm