New Challenges

Earlier this month Glenn Entis, VP and chief visual officer at Electronic Arts, took the stage at the Montreal Games Summit to offer his thoughts on the latest developments in graphics technology.

Afterwards, GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Entis to discuss his ideas in more depth, and to find out what the future holds for EA. In part one of our interview, published below, he discusses the importance of producing new IP, changes in company culture and the need for growth.

Visit GamesIndustry.biz next week to read about Entis's views on graphics versus gameplay and what he makes of the next-gen consoles.

Glenn Entis: Absolutely. I think we're making that change at all levels. People forget sometimes that the largest single part of the EA corporation is a lot of talented game developers.

One thing we've realised as a company is that those game developers are happier, more inspired, and seem to be drawing in more talent when we're doing the exciting, creative work. It's simple - people want to be proud of the work they do.

We've always strived to make the best titles, but now as we're changing we also want to have great new properties and really pick up the pace. Also as a business, we really believe that real future is creating new properties and building them up over time.

We've certainly done that; we've got some great franchises that we own that we've really built the company on in some respects. I think for any game team there's a tremendous pride in being able to say this team, or the studio didn't just do this game, they actually created this property, they invented the characters and the story lines.

Isn't it a big risk to move away from the franchise-based business model that has been so successful for EA in the past?

Glenn Entis: There are always risks in business, but it may be a bigger risk not to develop new intellectual property. Just to be clear, we're not moving away from the old business model. The licensed properties we build, we love those titles, we have great relationships with the license holders.

What we're saying is we also need to agressively supplement that with original titles. What people are seeing as a change from EA is not a completely new direction. We're taking something we've always done, which is to create new titles, but we're saying we really want to pick up the pace now, we want to be more energetic at that - and we're willing to take more creative risks to do that.

Probably the biggest difference is, with titles a couple of years ago where we might have said, 'That feels a little risky,' or, 'We're not really certain how that's going to turn out, we'd better not do that,'... We're more willing right now to bet on really talented developers and say, 'Okay, this is new and we can see there are real risks, but we believe in the people their passion about it.'

It would seem the way you view your employees has also changed. Is that because EA hit the headlines a few years ago when there were complaints about the hours developers were working?

That certainly got everybody's attention. There have been a lot of other changes to the company that are completely unrelated. We've had major reorganisations in worldwide studios over the last year or so, that always stimulates a company when you have a new team with a fresh outlook.

The reason we're in this business is because we love graphics, we love programming, we love games. So we say, what kind of company do we want to be, who do we want to be, what kind of people do we want to have here, how do we want people to feel about their time at EA?

Life's too short to be proud of a place that isn't inspiring to people, doesn't let people do their best work, doesn't attract great people. The people that I work with, we all have to run a responsible business, but if we felt like we couldn't aso create a great development environment - which means improving on some things we've done in the past, really trying to make EA a phenomenal place for talent - I just don't think we'd be as excited or we'd probably be doing something else.

What do you make of the ongoing rumour that EA is out to buy Ubisoft?

I can't comment on any of that, but I can say as a company we've always grown aggressively. We grow that way by building titles, by starting and investing in new studios like the studio here in Montreal, and then we've grown by aquisition - for example Criterion Games Studios, or DICE over in Stockholm.

In general we're always looking at growth, we're always looking for new opportunities to grow. Any particular deal, any particular thing we're doing obviously always has its own issues. We believe in growth where it makes sense, not for its own sake. It's got to be a good business fit and it's got to be a good cultural fit.