EA Says Old Way Of Releasing Live Service Games Doesn’t Work Anymore

EA reaffirmed support but it also stated that the encounter has directed it to realise it needs to start handling live-service game releases than it has previously.

“The reality is, it’s not just an EA challenge, but it’s an industry-wide challenge,” CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned during the telephone, referencing the issues of creating and functioning large-scale open-world games such as Anthem. “You’re moving from what was originally a BioWare game which would be somewhere between 40 and 80 hours of offline play to 40 to 80 hours of offline play and 100 or even 200, 300 hours of old game that happens with millions of different players in scale, online.”

That has an impact on growth and QA procedures, however, EA is also analyzing how it introduces new games to audiences. Wilson said that in Asia, major online games generally undergo several community evaluations and a gentle launch before everything goes. In the West, however, important publishers have stuck with older conventions: A”drip-feed strategy” to marketing to”develop the appetite and enthusiasm for the sport,” that leads straight to launch.

“As games have gotten larger that system is not working as as well as it has done in years gone by. What you should expect from us is that it is not just about changing the growth procedures in the game, it’s not just about changing the QA procedure in the sport –although both of these things are being altered dramatically inside our organisation right now–but in addition, it comes down to altering how we launch games,” Wilson stated.

“You should expect that we will begin to test things such as soft launches–the very same things that you see in the mobile space right now. And it also comes down to changing how we communicate with players. Our entire marketing firm today is shifting out of presentation mode and into conversation mode, and changing how we interact with players as time passes.”

Wilson believes that change in approach should help make sure that games run better and more reliably when they go completely live, and will even help players”know just what it is they’re likely to be playing, and the way they are likely to be playing on the day of launching and over time”

“We believe that we’re in a excellent place for this–I think this gets extremely hard for those who don’t have scale to do this, and so we feel very good about it,” Wilson said. “And over time we hope that we can lead from the front and help other developers and publishers change how they do things as well.”