EA pays lip service to innovation

Business Week has a story up saying Electronic Arts allegedly wants to change its strategy from relying on movie and sports franchises to actually coming up with its own unique games.

It's a welcome attitude adjustment from EA, but we'll see if they actually do anything about it. The article says Paul Lee, EA's president of Worldwide Studios, "wants to push the number of games based on internally created concepts above 50% of EA's total portfolio in the next 12 to 18 months, from about 30% today, and create at least one new franchise a year." But the only example given of changes implemented so far is one executive encouraging innovation and using smaller groups to develop Medal of Honor: Airborne. Medal of Honor isn't based on a movie license, but it's a derivative franchise that's similar to a lot of other games.

It's also not encouraging that EA seems to be pinning its hopes for change on Spore. Will Wright's game is sure to be huge, but so was The Sims. Relying on Wright to come up with another franchise isn't innovation -- it's doing the same thing they've been doing for years. The challenge is to find new Will Wrights and give them the same freedom that Wright has to create the next great, innovative franchise.