EA is generally considered to be one of the most exploitative and abusive companies in the industry, but the publisher, which is one of the world’s biggest, believes that it has a responsibility and an obligation to move the gaming industry forward- something that it, by its own admission, cannot achieve if it relies only on big franchises such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect, or Battlefield.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions inside the studios around our responsibility as Electronic Arts to push the industry forward and to help others,” EA Studios executive vice president Patrick Soderlund said in a new interview with GamesIndustry International. “We can’t just be a company that’s only about gigantic big things. There’s more of a portfolio mentality that there’s some things that we want to give to the players, that’s something like Unravel.”
Unravel is a a new game that was debuted at E3 2015, which sports a character named Yarny, made of Yarn, representing love, and trying to affect and influence people’s lives in good ways. That, according to EA, is part of a concerted effort to do more than just AAA games.
“We will always put a lot of effort into our AAA games, but it’s good for us to have a portfolio that is maybe broader than what we’ve had in the past,” Soderlund explained.
Personally, between EA picking up games like this, Activision focusing on smaller projects via the Sierra label, and Ubisoft pushing out smaller projects using the UbiArt engine, I think it is good to see the bigger publishers in the industry expanding their scope to beyond just big name franchise experiences.