I really liked this interview of Electronic Arts' VP of Corporate Communications Jeff Brown that appears on Eurogamer.net.
The story gives some keen insight on the gaming business and EA's philosophies. I actually learned a lot and Jeff's thoughts got me thinking about some ideas I had never thought about. Here's an interesting snippet:
If you start with the consideration that when new platforms launch, the first five million 360s, the first five million PS3s, for that matter even the first five million Wiis are going to be purchased by the hardest of the hardcore fans. They don't like James Bond, and most of them don't like Harry Potter and things like that. There are huge audiences for those games, but typically not within the universe of people who buy the first five million units of a new piece of technology.
What they like is this really freaky game IP which is weird and twitchy and really is made for people who grew up on games, and don't need to approach a game from a motion picture mentality or a book mentality. They love game IP, and they understand it. Now is the time to introduce that, when these people are coming to these systems.
Never really thought about it that way - that the first games that a developer designs for a new platform are for the hardcore fans, not the more general gaming consumer.
Another interesting snippet regarding the big differences in gaming and movie sequels:
With iterations and sequels in videogames, there's a huge loyal audience that really likes it, and one of the reasons that they come to like a franchise is because typically, there's a lot of innovation within each one of these iterations. So I dispute the idea that Dead or Alive 3 or Halo 3 or something like that are inherently not as good as the originals; that's motion picture thinking, that's not videogame thinking.
Good interview. Read the entire article here on Eurogamer.net.
-aB
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