Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

I think the thing a lot of people don't realise when trying to make the next runaway hit game is that most of the games they're trying to emulate weren't produced with that intent, and didn't get their popularity with a running start as some massive AAA behemoth.

Fortnite itself was originally a base-building PVE zombie game that Epic cranked out a battle royale mode for in a couple of months after seeing that PUBG (which at the time was a janky, unpolished and presumably cheap-to-develop standalone version of an ARMA mod) was a huge success. Then after it's out, Epic restructures behind it as a cash cow, makes it into a modding platform, uses it to improve Unreal Engine, etc.

Minecraft was a little solo project in Java - now 350m copies sold. It didn't start off as a platform for other games, available on every console with cutting edge graphics and $100m in marketing spend behind it.

Ark sold 80 million copies. It was an Early Access game on Steam by a team of 35, then it took off and they ported it to everything.

Battle Royale's been done and been a huge hit for PUBG (2017), then Fortnite, then Warzone. I think it's about time that people would be getting sick of it, same as open world survival crafting games were the big thing (Minecraft, DayZ, Ark) and MMOs. Next Battlefield is $400m, all those other big hits were probably more in the $100k-$1m range. Maybe it would be better to make a bunch of $1m-$10m range games, see which one is a hit, then move resources behind it. I imagine changing the structure of a big business like EA to be able to make a move like that would be a very, very difficult undertaking though.

I don’t think it’s about the size off the project but the crestivity, cohesion, gameplay and good storytelling.

There are plenty of counter examples like Witcher 3, Desth Starnding, Resident Evil Village and Cyberpunk (regardless of its rocky launch)

The issue with EA and Ubisoft nowadays is that they are not run by game designers but by MBAs and HR departments. There is very little room to disagree with the mandates and if the game must have x,y,z then you need to find a way to cram it regardless.

When you kill the creativity and don’t take bold risks, you kill innovation and ultimately suck the soul out of the game.

Games are a form of art after all.