14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts has learned quite a lesson from the disappointing sales of titles like Dead Space, the space based horror shooter, and Mirror's Edge, the free running dystopian experience. The admission comes from Glen Schofield, the general manager of the Redwood Shores developer studio Electronic Arts has in San Francisco.
He talked to Gamesindustry.biz while demoing for journalists an early version of the upcoming Dante's Inferno, which is based on the classic literature piece by Dante Alighieri. Electronic Arts, under the direction of John Riccitiello, has declared that it plans to focus on creating new intellectual properties, while increasing the quality of the other titles that it publishes. But this strategy seems to have backfired when the high profile games that it launched in the later half of 2008 were flops in terms of sales, despite being appreciated by reviewers and critics.
Glen Schofield believes this was because the games were lost amongst a host of other high profile releases, like Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty: World at War. He said that “Some people are calling this last year one of the best years in the history of videogames. You just had one great game after another, so we were just right in the middle of it, and you have to have a lot of money behind you to shout out.”
Electronic Arts will be moving away from the practice of launching blockbusters only in the run up to Christmas. Schofield has pointed out to titles like Grand Theft Auto IV, which launched in May to be one of the big successes of 2008, while Resident Evil 5 is launching in spring. EA will now seek to spread its big releases around to cover the whole year, although no dates have been announced for 2009.
Schofield also revealed that his studio was working on a sequel to Dead Space, saying that “We haven't announced anything yet, but I don't think you take a game that's rated 89 and just go, 'Well, that was a failure.'”