14 DAY TRIAL // EA, one of the biggest video game companies in the business, admitted, through the voice of its CEO, John Riccitiello, that it has exploited its Need For Speed franchise by putting a single developer, EA Black Box, to release a new game each year.
Need For Speed is still one of the most popular racing game franchises, but in the last few years, it has lost a lot of its appeal, as titles were only arriving from the Black Box studio in Vancouver, which EA, according to Riccitiello, was put on "death march".
The executive revealed that employees were working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in order to ship a new NFS game each year, and that was affecting quality and morale quite severely.
"I'll tell you a story," Riccitiello told the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2010 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference. "If you went back to when I first got into the games industry, 1997, Need For Speed was a really strong title.
"In the '04 to '07 period, we had a single studio, Black Box, up in Vancouver, building our [NFS games]. And we literally had them on a death march building for five years in a row. [There were] annual iterations, they had to put it out; no rest for the weary. "
"It'd happened before - games publishers do this from time to time. We should have put them on two-year alternating cycles but we didn't. And the title declined dramatically. We started to lose people. They didn't want to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year."
Things have changed now, as Riccitiello admits that taking the franchise to multiple developers like Slightly Mad Studios, with Need For Speed Shift and the future Shift 2, or Criterion Games, with the upcoming Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, is giving better results.
"It was definitely our fault. Those days are gone. We're back in two studios and we've got them on bi-annual cycles. We made really great progress... with a strong entry last year, which was more of a simulation game.
"This year with Hot Pursuit, NFS is right back in the core action driving... it's had a two-year dev cycle... I feel great about it."
It seems that EA is really distancing itself from its more dubious past, when it was known for milking franchises left and right with yearly iterations that sucked the soul out of the games, and this is truly great for gamers, which have the most to benefit from this move.