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When facing pressure from angry investors over underperforming titles that upset their own fans, what’s a game company CEO to do?
That’s the question so inelegantly faced by Electronic Arts’ lead executive Andrew Wilson earlier this week, when trying to account for the dismal sales of last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Rather than perhaps admit that the game’s changed design didn’t meet audience expectations, or that the writing perhaps had quality issues due to a nightmarish production schedule…he took a different path.
Wilson essentially said that what they should have done was try to make one of those lucrative live service games that the whole industry was raring to jump into about five or six years ago.
This is one of the worst, most laughably out of date and market-missing answers to this sort of question I’ve seen in a long time. Why make a fun fourth entry in a long-running franchise for fans when you could try to jump into the most potentially fraught area in the entire gaming market?
The last year has been rough for the live service game space. These are titles that, rather than giving you some set number of hours of entertainment for one flat…
