It's no secret that EA has been moving away from its old way of relying on licensed games to creating its own original franchises. Speaking to Develop, EA Games president Frank Gibeau discussed the advantages and disadvantages of that new direction.
"We dumped that [James Bond] license because we felt like we needed to own more intellectual property, and we don't like where James Bond is going with all the creative limitations on it," Gibeau explained. "The percentage royalties you have to pay the licensors are going the wrong way for publishers. The margins are being squeezed. And, to top it all off, the movie-game business is falling apart."
"Considering the total amount of money we have to spend on those types of James Bond games, and the total amount of man-hours we had to put into them, we thought, 'Hell, let's work on our own IP.' The guys who made James Bond games for us, well yeah, they went on and made Dead Space."
"And look where we are now; what would you rather publish, retail and play -- the latest James Bond or Dead Space 2?"
