DICE: EA gets too much flack for not being innovative

EA receives too much flack for not being innovative when it is actually prone to greenlighting new ideas, the general manager of DICE has claimed.

Speaking to Gamasutra, Karl Magnus Troedsson said that the Battlefield studio had many opportunities to test out new features thanks to its successful history, and stressed it had been easy to convince EA to experiment with ideas.

Whilst he conceded that the bottom line of game development was the business side, he said that EA had released and backed new IPs, although he admitted this had not always been so successful at DICE.

“In the background of everything, we run a business, of course,” said Troedsson.

“But with the success we have had, there are opportunities. It’s quite easy for us to explain to upper management that, ‘We want to do this. We want to try this out’. And EA is actually very prone to try out new things, and I have to say that sometimes I think we get too much crap for not being innovative.

“We do release new IPs, and we do take care of IPs that have been out there. And perhaps not so successful, but we try to get new things out there as well. Now, that might sound strange coming from me, working on Battlefield. We’ve been around for 10 years, and we just keep doing more of the same, but being innovative in that space.

“But EA is quite easy to convince – for us, at least – to do more experiments, etcetera.”

Troedsson went on to say that sometimes it could be difficult for some consumers to notice innovation, as some features could be much smaller than others, but no less significant.

He said however that whilst testing out new ideas was good for the industry, games still needed to cater for their fan base and target audience, striking a balance between attracting new and old players.

“Innovation is something that actually changes something for the better, renews something – and I think we do that all the time,” said Troedsson.

“But some of them are big and some of them are small, and some people disagree, saying, ‘That’s not an innovation!’ and it’s like, ‘No, maybe not for you, but for the people playing the game it’s a big thing’.

“But it comes down to, the longer a product has been running, the more you need to challenge yourself to actually do something innovative. At the same time, as I mentioned before, as well, it needs to be the right level of innovation.

"You need a couple of them and then you feel like, ‘This is really, really good’, and, ‘This is going to be interesting’, perhaps, for both our core audience, but also hopefully attract new players into being interested in playing the franchise."