EA Partners' David DeMartini

Well, on the Respawn front, Vince and Jason were starting from ground zero – no office, no computers, no desks, no chairs… They had to really create all that foundation. So once they did that, they started hiring up a team, and since they hired up the team they’ve been talking about a lot of different ideas. When they get one that they’re all incredibly excited about, I’m sure they’re going to bring it to us, and we’ll talk through it, and that’ll be the one they go with.

No. No. It’s still at the creative stage. And, er, with Insomniac, different story. That is an incredibly mature team that has a 90-rated pedigree for a long, long history of titles. They’ve got an idea that is really, really clever and well thought-through, all the way through a prototyping phase, all the way with some customer feedback on it already. So they’re pretty far down the path, and hopefully in the near future we’ll have some stuff to talk about there.

I feel really bad about that. Everybody kinda looked at it and said "oh, you know, the game wasn't as good as it should have been" but they certainly didn't set out to make a game that wasn't as good as it should have been. Just so people understand, 3-400 people are now going to be working somewhere else, have their lives uprooted, their families are in a bit of turmoil right now as they try and catch on with another games company. It's just sad all the way around. It's not great for the industry either because the team gets tarnished, the game gets tarnished, customers aren't exactly delighted with the experience that they got. And it's an idea that had such tremendous promise, didn't have an opportunity to get to the finish line that everyone had hoped. It's just unfortunate the way it worked out.

Y'know, we were having a lot of discussions with them about where we thought the title was, at least advising them so that they could make a decision on... but everybody thinks that they should have just hung onto it for a longer time. But there was 300-400 people that worked there, and 300-400 people cost a lot on a monthly basis and I don't know the specifics of their situation but you need to have financial backing in order to have your enterprise up and running so it certainly wasn't our decision. So I feel bad for David, I feel bad for everybody on that team. It's not the outcome that they wanted.

People are still buying it and people are still enjoying it like I said, just from the Metacritic scores and stuff, it's not quite the game that everybody expected it to be. It's got some elements in there that are probably worth the money, the customisation, the character creation capability – unparalleled. There's nothing as good as what they put out there.

I don't think so. We do all different kinds of deals; that one in particular was a distribution deal, we weren't involved in the production, we were much more involved in getting the game out in the channel. We're not really involved in the back end either, so in that particular case I'd say not really, just because we didn't have anybody on the ground, we didn't really have an active production role in the title. We did suggest that where it landed from a review score standpoint was where we thought it was going to land from a review score standpoint. But I guess there's so many factors that go into a decision that it's hard to speculate on. I imagine they think they could have done some things differently at this point, but hindsight's always 20-20.

It's a really hard category to make a game. You spend tens of millions of dollars and then you hope the idea… well, that's a lot of risk. But I think Star Wars [The Old Republic] is going to be enormous; I think Star wars is the next big thing. Actually I'm highly confident that when that releases it’ll bring on a whole other wave to the category, and I think people are looking for something else besides World of WarCraft to kind of reinvigorate the category. The guys at Blizzard have done a great job with WarCraft and a great job of sustaining WarCraft, but after this period of time I think people are looking for a new thing within the category to kind of reinvigorate it.

Sometimes on new IPs, new IP gets scored a little more harshly than an established franchise. We’ve got a sense out there that sometimes designers or ideas are plus five or minus five designers or ideas. Sometimes the scores are a little artificially high because [reviewers] really have a liking for that designer or that team.

Yeah, there’s audience expectancy, the audience is going to want to like it. But I mean, we certainly don’t discount Metacritic. I think [the media] plays an incredibly important role in informing consumers. We may occasionally have a healthy disagreement about the quality of something. I’m still bitter about the first Godfather that I worked on – 78 per cent was about five points lower than I actually think it deserved. But they always rewarded me on Tiger [Woods PGA Tour] with 90-rated games, so I guess it all evens out.