Forgive me if you've already spotted this, but last week during his keynote at the DICE event in Las Vegas, EA president John Riccitiello admitted that EA's business model kills studios. Or at least it did:
The command and conquer model, the command and direct model doesn't work... Bullfrog, Origin, Westwood - all no longer exist today because something broke. ... and I'll simply state that EA blew it, and to a certain degree, since I was involved, I blew it. They told me they were stifled by politics, bureaucracy, and a fact they felt they weren't heard
How bizarre to hear of corporate lunacy humanised like this. I remember the collapse of Bullfrog - the UK developer that brought us Populous and Syndicate - from my first years in games journalism. I got several calls and emails from exasperated staff, talking about how projects were being canned left, right and centre in favour of safe, profitable sequels. How could EA have not known that it was ripping the very soul out of the studio? But it didn't know - because it was doing the same thing at Westwood and Origin.
So now Riccitiello talks of EA as a collection of semi-autonomous city states - the likes of Criterion, Pandemic and BioWare maintaining their own identities within the corporate embrace. And the embrace keeps widening. Today, there's news of more Hasbro board game conversions, both to console and mobile phone. Plus, the company has reportedly formed a new division, EA Blueprint, which will fund small-scale game development for social networking sites - in other words, EA will be doing Facebook and Myspace applications, some based on familiar EA brands, others on original IP - and all seemingly through the sponsorship of small, cheap studios.
The corporate strategy is no longer 'conquer and rule', it is 'mosey up and make friends'.
