14 DAY TRIAL // Peter Molyneux, the veteran game developer currently working with 22 Cans, says that publisher Electronic Arts is not actually the Evil Empire that many gamers see it as and that the company has contributed greatly to the development of the industry.
The game maker is quoted by Kotaku as saying that, “They’re a company that have done a great deal for this industry. When corporates buy companies, several things change. You’ve got this problem where the founders of the company get a lot of money—that changes those people, that changes the company there.”
Peter Molyneux was a founder of Bullfrog, which EA acquired in 1995, and was one of the original creators of the hit Populous series.
The studio never managed to deliver the same quality of title that it did when it was independent and the developer left the company after a while in order to create Lionhead.
He adds, “You’ve got the problem of what I call ‘love abuse’. When EA bought Bullfrog, they just wanted to make it nicer. They moved us to a nice office, where we couldn’t shoot each other in the corridors. We had an HR department because that was a nice proper professional thing to do. And that changes the flavor of the company.”
Many members of the development team were unable to cope with the change and the quality of their work declined before Bullfrog was officially dismantled and integrated into the United Kingdom division of Electronic Arts.
The publisher is one of the companies that constantly shows up on the list of nominees for Worst Company in America.
Electronic Arts has also acquired a reputation that any independent studio that joins it tends to lose its personality and its ability to innovate in the long term.
At the moment, Peter Molyneux is working on the Godus experience at 22 Cans.
His former company, Lionhead, is working with Microsoft on the development of Fable Legends, a cooperative experience that will allow gamers to become either a villain or a hero in the world of Albion and will be launched exclusively on the Xbox One.
The biggest current franchises for Electronic Arts are FIFA, Battlefield, Dragon Age, Madden NFL, Mass Effect.
The company says that it expects to deliver a profit during the coming year, although it is worried by the process of transition from the current-gen consoles to the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony.