14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts managed to cut its losses in 2009 and announced plans to put out less videogames in 2010 while aiming for higher quality. And it seems the publisher is allowing subsidiary studios to adopt their own philosophies when it comes to the number of titles they plan to put out.
Where BioWare launched two blockbusters, in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, in the space of six months, Visceral, the company behind Dead Space: Extraction, and Dante's Inferno, is more comfortable putting out one game each year.
Nick Earl, who is the general manager of Visceral Games, told Gamasutra as part of an interview that “What I've learned being general manager of the studio for the past nine years is you can overload a studio, and conversely, you can do extremely well financially, and at the end of the day, we need to be able to do that to continue to attract investment and be able to do the sort of creative endeavors we want.”
The one-per-year philosophy does not include smaller gaming experiences based around the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Nick Earl says that the limited scope of the projects, which he did not detail, allows the team to put them together and launch them while also working on the big videogame in the room that, for this year, is Dead Space 2.
Visceral also created the first Dead Space, which launched in 2007. The game was not the hit Electronic Arts was looking for but the experience was solid enough to earn a sequel. Dead Space 2 is set to be released on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the PC, and will follow protagonist Isaac Clarke to a huge space station where he will witness an outbreak of the Necromorph disease. The game should maintain the same scary atmosphere and include a multiplayer mode.