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Interview: Jon Van Caneghem on Reinventing Command & Conquer

Posted November 24, 2009 by James Brightman

One online strategy for EA of late has been the free-to-play or "freemium" market. The publisher has done it with Battlefield, Need for Speed, FIFA and more. Could C&C be next? “It's a possibility, although we don't have financial models yet for the product," Van Caneghem said. "We're focused on building the game first and then thinking of all the different ways, especially in the different territories, to monetize it. As you move more direct to consumer there's a lot of new stuff you can do, like tapping into social networking and online persistence. When you play a single player game, you go through it once and you're done. But when the game's connected online, you're always adding more stuff to it and it becomes much more like a service than just a packaged goods game.”

The "games as a service" has been a mantra for EA CEO John Riccitiello for some time now, and it's one of the reasons Van Caneghem decided to join EA.  “In meeting with John Riccitiello, and his convincing me to come here, we definitely see the same path for the future of games, and it's similar to what I promoted at Trion about the future of games as well – all this stuff coming together with online and social networking. I almost feel like the sleeping giant has been awakened here at EA and they'll be moving quite heavily in this direction, and it coincides really well with what I want to do," he said.

Before we wrapped up, we also asked Van Caneghem about the elusive Nintendo audience. After all, Riccitiello recently pointed out that EA's Wii games have been weaker than expected. But could C&C fit within that Nintendo demographic? The answer would appear to be yes. “We're seeing strategy games proliferate on the DS and some are starting to appear on the Wii, and if you look at some of the products on the social networking sites, they basically have their roots with strategy games I built like Heroes and all sorts of products from the past. So the audience is there, whether they even realize they're playing a strategy game or not," he said.

We're certainly curious to see where Van Caneghem takes C&C next, and we'll be sure to keep you updated on any new developments.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.