Last year, Electronic Arts tried to reverse its course with new IPs like Army of Two, Battlefield: Bad Company, Facebreaker, Mirror's Edge and Dead Space. The company's credibility (long marred by a reputation for movie-licensed titles and sequels) with the game playing community was raised, although some parts of this plan were a bit too ambitious, admits EA Games head Frank Gibeau.
"I'm not the kind of guy that ever looks back. I look back long enough to learn a few things, and then apply them going forward," said Gibeau to Gamasutra."But I think that we launched too many new IPs all at once in [fiscal] Q3 [the holiday quarter]. I would have spread them out and found better windows for them. I would have had longer marketing for them. The marketing cycles were fairly short. We didn't have enough assets to build a fan base, build a community and get that long-demand build."
"So in hindsight, I probably would have picked a couple different windows for Dead Space and Mirror's Edge," he added. "It was kind of unknowable at the time because a lot of IP gets created in those times of big traffic and lots of volume. And we didn't anticipate a dramatic downturn in the economy."
While the first year of EA's ambitious plan to launch new, internally developed IPs wasn't as smooth as they may have hoped, Gibeau says that they've learned lessons about how to handle these new games. Namely, he thinks quality is key to getting those higher review scores. "We're trying to much more aggressively put in at least two to three months of polish time back into the schedule," said Gibeau. "So a game is actually functionally complete, content complete, then we go in and we put it through mass amounts of tests, massive amounts of replay-throughs, so that we can really get those five, 10, 15 points on Metacritic."
Gibeau freely admitted that this extra time in the development cycle was not something always present at EA. "Three or four years ago, products were coming in hot, hitting the market hot. ... You know, last year's Need for Speed finished tests, and that was it," he explained. "There was no time in the schedule [for polish] because of the way the studios had been set up. We had to break the cycle and give very careful consideration to polish times. We have to have that polish time at the end of the project, or none of it matters."
EA's Frank Gibeau Talks Lessons Learned in Launching New IP
Posted June 5, 2009 by David Radd
David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.