EA to Change Development and Release Strategy in Wake of Anthem Troubles

After Anthem, EA's latest big release that failed to live up to expectations, the company is planning to make changes to its development and release strategy.

PC Gamer reports that EA's CEO Andrew Wilson talked about some of the problems faced in the industry when it comes to developing huge games like Anthem during the company's latest financial results conference call.

"The reality is, it's not just an EA challenge, it's an industry-wide challenge," said Wilson. "You're moving from what was initially a BioWare game which would be somewhere between 40 and 80 hours of offline play to 40 to 80 hours of offline play plus 100 or 200, 300 hours of elder game that happens with millions of other players at scale, online."

Wilson also talked about the difference between releasing such games in the west compared to Asian markets. In Asia, such games are released by having multiple tests or soft launches in smaller communities before launched at full scale. In the West, Wilson said, there is a tendency to stick to the more traditional hype marketing build up and then set a release for a large audience.

"As games have gotten bigger that system isn't working as well as it has done in years gone by. So what you should expect from us is that it's not just about changing the development processes in the game, it's not just about changing the QA process in the game—although both of those things are being changed dramatically inside our organization right now—but it also comes down to changing how we launch games," Wilson explained.

"You should expect that we'll start to test things like soft launches—the 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 organization now is moving out of presentation mode and into conversation mode, and changing how we interact with players over time."

The hope is that this new approach will give players a better idea of the game and will help developers discover how to support it once it has fully launched.

While Anthem wasn't exactly the financial success EA had hoped for, it still managed to be the best-selling game in February. Developer BioWare has also promised that it is 100% committed to Anthem even though some staff have left the project.

Hope Corrigan is an Australian freelance writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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