Electronic Arts may be stubborn on its contentious use Digital Rights Management (DRM), but sometimes that stubborness makes for positivity. For instance, sales for their published titles Dead Space and Mirror's Edge haven't been great (or so we may have thought), but that isn't going to stop them from continuing to push innovation and quality. Patrick Söderlund, the senior vice president of EA Games Europe attests:
"I think if you analyze games like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge for their lifetime performance, I bet you'll find them to be seen as successful.
They're both new IPs; it's hard to break new ground with new IPs, especially in that Q3 window, when you have games like Gears of War 2, Call of Duty 5, and a bunch of other really strong products with a 2, or 3, or 4, or 5 on it. So, I think that we could have done a better job as far as ship timing on, probably, both of those.
I think that in the case of Dead Space, I think that we executed well on our quarter targets; probably better than we could have hoped for. I love the game; I think it's an awesome game, so kudos to the team for putting it together.
I think on Mirror's Edge we did a lot of things that we set ourselves up to do: it's an extremely innovative product, both in terms of art direction, to in-game music, to the movement and everything. Is it perfect? No. Are there things in there that we will address for future versions? Absolutely. Was it a good first attempt? Yes! That's kind of how I summarize it."
Söderlund concludes: "I think that as long as you learn from your previous product, and you learn from what worked and what didn't work, you're ultimately going to be okay."
This is wonderful to hear, as Electronic Arts have been on this kick for awhile and those are really good things -- consistency, longevity. His stance on DRM, however -- one that seems to be shared throughout the company -- puts a damper on an otherwise encouraging conversation:
"I think people are completely overreacting... I think that we could have done a better job explaining why we're doing it, and making sure that people understand that unless we do something like this, we won't be able to build games for you on PC."
Where does this idea come from? If that's true then why is Dawn of War II (DoW II) the #1 PC game at retail and digital outlets in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Australia with no DRM (aside from Steam's for that version, which, well, isn't too bad as far as DRM goes)? Please, EA, if you have an answer for that, we'll gladly publish it.
Folks may recall DoW II's developer Relic and their stance on the stuff iterated by DoW II lead designer Johnny Ebbert a couple months ago; we'll republish it here for good measure:
"We really want to give our players a top-notch online experience and we want to reward our players for playing our game. We want to give out steady doses of free downloadable content because we believe in rewarding people who buy the game and the reason we don’t like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops. We don’t want to do that so we’re going with the approach that Valve pioneered to just reward the people who actually bought the game with cool stuff. Free downloadable, regularly accessible stuff that enhances the game and then that’s an incentive for the people who didn’t buy the game to buy it. So we’ve got a really bold, robust strategy for that and we’re going to be revealing more details in about a month, but I think players are going to like it. And everybody wins you know? The people who paid for the game don’t have to go through any fuss and they’re constantly getting new stuff, which keeps the game fresh."
Five words: number one PC gameworldwide!
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