And how EA is open to the Originals program being as big or small as it needs to be.
This weekend sees the release of another in the EA Originals lineup, Sea of Solitude. And rather than waiting for a later date to reveal what’s to come from EA’s funding of independent developers, we know more than ever about the EA Originals lineup thanks to this year’s EA Play. But EA Originals will only grow as much as it needs to, so long as it can still give each developer the attention they need.
Speaking to IGN, EA’s EVP of development and growth Matt Bilbey explained that the announcement of three new EA Originals during the E3 2019-adjacent EA Play saw an increase in the number of new games from years past not because of a desire to simply grow the program but instead “due to the quality of the opportunities.”
“It’s scaled up [from previous years] due to the quality of the opportunities from the independent development scene that we saw,” Bilbey said. “As we look ahead to the next one or two years, I could see us scaling up to more.
At EA Play, EA announced a new project from Hazelight, the developers of A Way Out, Zoink’s Lost in Random, and Glowmade’s RustHeart. In previous years, EA has stuck to just announcing a single game, like Zoink’s previous EA Original, Fe, Sea of Solitude, or Unravel. And while Bilbey said EA Originals could continue to see growth like this, the most important element for EA is maintaining a close relationship with each developer brought into the program.
“It was just the volume of quality ideas, and if that continues I could see [EA Originals[ continuing to grow. What is important is every game that we have, we assign a producer within EA that acts as the tentacle limb to Electronic Arts… We don’t want to get to the point where one producer’s looking after 10 or 15 different developers because that’s when we’ll lose the real uniqueness of what EA Originals and [EA Partners] is.”
Bilbey said part of that connection also gives these EA Originals and EA Partners teams access “to our competitive gaming team so they can understand what they would need to develop a feature set for competitive gaming…if they wanted a market place or auction house or security if they wanted to go free to play or premium, going to Asia.”
But Bilbey said “there are absolutely no boundaries of creativity when it comes to, ‘We have to have an EA Originals game that looks like this,'” with the company instead wanting the independent teams to dictate what the games look like. That lack of limitations is also in reference to scope, with Bilbey pointing out that they refer to the next game from Josef Fares and the A Way Out team internally as “Project Nuts,” calling it “a much bigger concept, a much bigger idea.”
Whatever the scope or size of these projects may be, while EA generally expects development to not go on for more than a couple of years, the publisher doesn’t necessarily have an exact cadence in mind for when EA Originals should be released to help support the EA Origin Access library, an approach different from, for example, Xbox’s intention to support its Game Pass subscription service with a regular cadence of exclusives.
Of course, the majority of EA’s focus is on its large-scale titles and ongoing support for games with live services, particularly when it comes to attracting players to its subscription service, which is soon coming to PS4. One of EA’s solutions, at least on PC, is to make players who may dedicate all of their time to ongoing games that these smaller experiences are available to them from within the games themselves.
“We can market our content from within our games. We can also, from our research understand how many people are interacting with a single account, what games they’re playing, and then from the portfolio of close to 200 games on PC, we can then offer up, based on the games that they’re playing to the frontend of the game that they’re playing, we can tell that you may play a multiplayer game every night. But three times a week you’re playing a single player game…we can then surface, maybe, Sea of Solitude,” Bilbey said.
“We’re very mindful of being able to surface the depth of content that we have within Origin and our subscription but then more importantly be able to communicate the personalized approach to what games we believe you would want to play based on the games that you have played.
Beyond PC and the EA Origin Access storefront there, though, EA is open to having its EA Originals on as many platforms as possible. And many of those games would seem like natural fits for the Nintendo Switch. So, for fans of EA Originals, them not being announced for Switch now doesn’t mean they won’t come later, as was the case with Unravel Two.
“We try to commit as many of the games as we’re making on the Switch. So if it’s not there now, it doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future,” Bilbey said. “Our goal would be to get every game to every platform if we could.”
Bilbey also recently spoke with GameIndustry.biz about struggling with the perception that EA is “just a bunch of bad guys.”
Sea of Solitude is now available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can read IGN’s Sea of Solitude review for more.
Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor and host of Beyind! Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
