Games industry veteran Ben Cousins, creative director of the EA-owned DICE Sweden developing studio, recently spoke to gamesindustry.biz about the massive publisher’s attitude towards new intellectual properties. When asked how much EA actually focussed on new IPs in light of the many sequels and expansion packs the company produces, Cousins replied “A lot more than you'd expect. That was my impression going into the job; I thought the pervading wisdom was that they were going to keep churning out sequels, and when you're selling 10 million units of Madden and Need for Speed every year then you need to keep doing that.

“My impression from the execs I've met is that they're really excited by the idea of new IP, but when EA does something they do it big. They don't push out a little arty game on the side and hope it sells well; if there is going to be a new IP developed at EA everyone needs to believe in it."

“Maybe it's going to take them longer than a smaller developer to get a new IP out because they want it to make a big splash, but I don't feel like I'm banging my head against the wall or that this is just a tokenistic movement. I think that EA is becoming much more open.”

With development costs so high, I think this console generation is going to be particularly tough on developers without hefty financial backing, especially at retail. We’ve seen some encouraging declarations of new IP support from companies like Lucasarts, but it's a little too early to say how much they will actually put behind these claims. Fracture looks promising, though. I'm still hoping that more publishers and developers turn to the PSN. Xbox Live Arcade seems to be focusing more on, well, an arcade experience. It'd be good to see more third-party devs experiment with the PSN, as with LittleBigPlanet.

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