When running a publicly-held video game mega-publisher made up of around 7,700 employees, executives at Electronic Arts have the daunting task of trying to foster innovation within a giant machine that cranks out video games, one after the other.
Patrick Soderlund, EVP of the EA Games label, which houses major brands like Battlefield and Mass Effect, recognizes that in these huge corporations, there is sometimes the need for more of a creative outlet. After all, video games are the product of human creativity, and once that is snuffed out, there's not much left.
That's why about a year ago, EA decided to pay closer attention to small groups of developers within the company that were coming up with interesting new ideas; bubbles of innovation that were emerging within the belly of EA.
"We have to come to a point, and we are at that point now, where we can actually afford to experiment," Soderlund recently told Gamasutra. "We have several ideation teams at our studio -- we call them 'labs' -- that may be working on five or six things at one time. And there may be five, ten people, or maybe even 20 people, who won't even have a direction.
"I firmly believe that you need to let people experiment and test things and come up with strange ideas," he continued. "We may present a larger problem to them. For example -- a rather bad example -- 'We're missing a character-based action game' or something. They'd make a ton of things, and show us the results. The idea is to test things and either continue them, or kill them early.
"Most ideas probably won't be the right ones. But then, one out of 10 or 15 ideas will be the right one. And that's the one that we'll say, 'We like that, continue.' Then we'll start funding it."
Small experimental teams within larger publishing bodies are not unique to EA. But the fact that EA is now paying attention to and investing time in innovation in such an organized manner might be a surprise to those who view EA as a monolithic video game factory.
"When you have a company this big, you'll have these [small groups] form naturally, because there's so many people," Soderlund said. "We just said, 'It's kind of happening anyway, so let's take control over it, and make this okay to do -- let's make sure that people can work with us.'
"We've been doing it in a controlled form for a little over a year within our label," he added. "We started small, with one team, then we tested and saw some good results with it. A lot of the things you see today in our products come from these ideas. It doesn't necessarily need to be a new product. Maybe it's a way to make better animations, or a way of making cooler destruction."
Soderlund, one of the founders of EA-owned Battlefield studio DICE, said the seed for these idea labs was planted at DICE during the development of the experimental downloadable online shooter, Battlefield 1943.
"That [game's development] was basically a way for us to control ups and downs in our production cycles," he said. "Normally, people would go into a production too early, or they would basically get transferred to an existing game team. Instead we said, 'Do whatever you want. We'll put you in this pod, do whatever you want.'
"And they said, 'Hey do you want to do Battlefield back in World War II again?' So they kept working on that. That kind of started something. Now we do it in all our studios.
"I think it's important that we enable our people to innovate, and to be able to come up with new ideas. Because frankly, that's what our audience wants."
Gamasutra will have more from Soderlund in a wide-ranging interview in the near future.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hatsworth_in_the_Puzzling_Adventure
Glad to see EA still has a strategy to continue to foster these types of ideas!
Also: "bubbles of innovation that were emerging within the belly of EA." This may be one of the more disturbing sentences I've ever read on Gamasutra....
Disclaimer: I was with Pandemic Studios nearly 10 years when EA bought Pandemic in 2008. Left voluntarily in Nov 2009.
This happened with the Alice sequel not too long ago - The original Alice was included as a bonus if you preordered from EA, as an exclusive. Today the original game is still not available for sale anywhere, including Origin! They offered a 12-year old game that people want to buy for a couple of weeks as a preorder bonus, then killed it. Absolutely idiotic.
Yeah, how come System Shock 1 never gets any love, huh? Everyone always talks about the sequel like the first one never happened, but I firmly believe the original is the superior experience. Better story, better puzzles, and more varied gameplay throughout. The sole flaw is the game engine, yet it is still compelling even today via DOSBox.
I specifically mentioned Namco, who's flooded the zone with their classics, releasing emulated versions of their games on PS1, PS2, PS3, XBox1, X360, N64, Gamecube, Wii, GBA, DS, PC. Sega's not been quite as prolific, but they're getting better. It's been 15+ years since Namco started this strategy - you can't call EA "listening" if only a small percentage of their titles are available for mass consumption. Tracking down rights wouldn't take 15+ years if management actually cared.
While there have been plenty of re-releases of EA games over the years, there have been very, very few examples of them having been done right. That PSP compilation you mentioned, in particular, was nothing more that straight ports of the SNES versions of the games. Most reviewers agreed that the package was almost completely worthless: http://tinyurl.com/7ehcxsc.
Similarly, the GOG releases have not been well-handled either. Most problematic is that EA gave the rights for GOG to sell only the core games, without any of the expansions. Many of those expansions, like Alien Crossfire for Alpha Centauri, contained major updates and enhancements to the rest of the game, and the whole package suffers for their absence.
God knows why EA declined to make the expansions available, but given their past behavior, it's hard not to expect that they are holding them back with the intention of offering the "complete" versions later via Origin. Whatever their excuse, I doubt it's anything less than ridiculous.
Don't mean this as a dig at EA developers, I'm sure they are as creative as any people. But this will not fix the fundamental problem with the process.
The problem with what EA is doing is they are trying to corral that creativity and control it rather than giving it time to grow free. While they may still get some neat stuff, they won't get near as much as a company that fosters creativity from the beginning.
p.s. - how creativity works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg
It could be pretty amusing, actually - They'd probably have to print out that giant mash of disclaimers, restrictions and registration requirements that you always have to agree to right there on the project's page. Maybe one of the rewards for the $100 tier would read something like this:
"Exclusive to this campagin, EA will give you 60 days notice before we shut down the servers, instead of the standard 30 that everyone else gets! Get an extra month of enjoyment from your game before we kill it forever!"
That would be a popular reward amongst the backers, I bet.
Quote for the front cover, right there.
I'd love it if this was true, i don't inherently have anything against EA. It's just that this is all such corporate talk, it's like i'm taking part in a political rally. They're employing 7700 people and the extent of their "creativity" is creating gimmicks to existing IPs that most fans hate or aquiring studios that aren't dominated by the corporate model yet and still have some creative people in them.
I mean you can write 10 more articles with empty quotes, i don't mind. But then there's real innovative studios like Mojang or Wolfire Games which creative work EA can't even begin to comprehend.