Also talks about the future of movie based titles.
Movie based titles are either a hit or a miss but it doesn't seem to garner enough cash for publishers to be happy. EA which holds the Harry Potter license but let go of the Bond license a couple of years ago say they are happy to let go the franchise.
"We dumped that licence because we felt like we needed to own more intellectual property, and we don’t like where James Bond is going with all the creative limitations on it. The percentage royalties you have to pay the licensors are going the wrong way for publishers. The margins are being squeezed. And, to top it all off, the movie-game business is falling apart.
Considering the total amount of money we have to spend on those types of James Bond games, and the total amount of man-hours we had to put into them, we thought; hell, let’s work on our own IP. The guys who made James Bond games for us, well yeah, they went on and made Dead Space.
And look where we are now; what would you rather publish, retail and play – the latest James Bond or Dead Space 2?"
The Bond license which tries to keep up with new movies or sometimes try to create their own story sometimes have shorter Dev life cycles, what that means is that the Publisher will not give the Developers enough time to complete the game which means the game will most likely ship with a lot of bugs and crashes as seen in both Bond titles that released earlier (Bloodstone and Goldeneye Remake). Activision is a great Publisher for doing just that and pushing titles that ship with so many problems that it angers players. You can see examples in the new Call of Duty Black Ops as well as BloodStone and Goldeneye Remake which has many visual problems as well as framerate issues etc.
EA says it will focus on Quality more now than every.
"Quality. We were shipping games that weren’t very good, that were late, and at the same time we had a cultural problem at the company that was creating problems with quality. Those three things have been my focus – I want to create the best games organisation in the world.
Two years ago, when I took over the organisation, quality was in the low-70s, we had a lot of franchises and many of them weren’t healthy. Need For Speed was sliding in quality, Medal Of Honor barely existed, and when I came in, it was apparent to me that the best studios in the world have their own cultures, and not a lot of ours had that.
Look at DICE, look at Blizzard, look at BioWare – these groups have their own distinct workplace culture and development ethos. We have to foster that. We have to decentralise the studios – creating what we call city-states, where developers have their own creative autonomy and their own business. And we have to give developers more time to put the polish into games to make them great.
I want to have the best development organisation in the world, and that’s measured by the risks we take creatively, the quality we deliver inside of the products, and the commitments we make to the company. That’s not something that can be done overnight; it takes two years to build a quality game, and now I think our strategy is becoming vindicated."
Whether or not EA can deliver all depend on the titles they will be shipping in the near future.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment