14 DAY TRIAL // Andrew Wilson, the chief executive officer of publisher Electronic Arts, says that the video game industry needs to focus on the creation of great games in the coming years while investing less time and resources into marketing and decisions linked to format and business models.
He is quoted by VG247 as saying that, at the moment, creating content is a complex endeavor that needs time and money and that players will never be interested in the business decisions that a company makes, only in the quality of the experiences that it delivers.
The executive explains that, “If the industry can avoid the distraction of platforms, of geographies, of business models, and really just focus on making great games for whatever their target audience is, for whatever that gamer-centric group of people is; then I think we’ll be all right.”
Recently, Electronic Arts has been criticized for a number of issues, from the way it has chosen to monetize the recent reboot of Dungeon Keeper to the way it failed to deliver an offline version of SimCity from Maxis for one year after the game was launched.
The launch process for Battlefield 4, the high-profile shooter from DICE, was recently affected by some major issues, although at the moment most of them have been solved via patches.
It has also won the Worst Company in America during previous years, but it seems to be safe from having the same fate in 2014.
Andrew Wilson adds, “Great games work no matter what platform you’re on or what business model you’re going with. If you can provide great entertainment, then you can really get down to that minute-to-minute interaction that’s fun and enjoyable and feels like great value.”
The CEO also acknowledges that his company needs to learn from its mistakes and make sure that future big titles are launched with adequate support and with a much smaller number of bugs that affect the player community.
Electronic Arts is one of the biggest video game publishers, competing in terms of revenue and number of releases with Activision and Ubisoft.
The biggest coming titles for this year include Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is confirmed as arriving in the fall, and a new installment in the Battlefield franchise.
The company also has a long-term partnership with Disney to create titles based on the Star Wars universe, which are at the moment in development at DICE, BioWare and Visceral.