In an interview at EA Play last month, Laura Miele, EA’s Executive VP of Global Publishing, told Games Industry that Mirror’s Edge Catalyst was “definitely meeting our expectations.”
She continued:
We are pretty happy to bring this character and this world to market. It’s a big open world game, so we made a lot of evolution from the original experience and we’re very proud of that. I also think that Mirror’s Edge as a game IP – we talked earlier about the EA Originals, about having creative content, having a first person action game, having Faith and her story and character as a mix in the industry, is important for us. I think it’s important for EA to continue to do all games, big and small, and I’m really proud that we stayed committed to bringing that game to market.
Catalyst released a few days ahead of EA Play and finished its launch week in 2nd in the UK, and 9th in Japan. The sales rankings for June in the United States will be released soon.
Discussing the creative risks EA is taking, Miele said, “I think we actually have made quite a bit of progress that we haven’t publicly disclosed about what we’re working on. So I feel like we’ve made the most progress in things that are going to be coming out in the future that we haven’t talked about yet.”
These risks include Catalyst, as well as Unravel, which “was a big hit for us from an indie creativity perspective. But stay tuned because there’s more ahead for us.”
While Miele also sees what they’re doing with the Star Wars franchise as being creative, she can’t say anything quite yet. “Some of our Star Wars experiences, I know we can’t announce yet, but there will be new characters and new story lines, which will be part of Star Wars canon as it goes forward. So I think we believe that we’re innovating and creating in important areas, particularly in the action category, that we’re really proud of that we can talk about at a different time,” she said.
Touching on virtual reality, Miele explained that VR’s a few years away from being meaningful to them, as they’re waiting for the install base to grow:
We believe that the immersion of that experience and to change your gameplay in that significant of a way is really meaningful for the industry. We just think it’s going to probably take a little bit longer for the install base and for the market to get to a place, from a business perspective, that will be meaningful for us. We think it’s a few years away still but we’re incredibly inspired and motivated by what the VR hardware teams are doing. We have labs and innovation teams developing for most of the platforms internally. So we actually have VR experiences within our company that are expressed on multiple platforms today.
While they aren’t fully supporting VR yet, EA will be releasing the Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission for PlayStation VR. As for those internal projects they have, “some are new IP and some are entirely new experiences that would not have expressed themselves in gaming before a VR experience… You have to think about what is the value and what is the meaning of this experience and how would you build an IP or an experience around that?”
She also touched on the Battlefield vs Call of Duty rivalry, saying that the “healthy competition in our industry is fun,” and she “welcome[s] the competitive challenge, but I also have a lot of respect for what our competitors do when new games come to market. I think it’s just a fun competition and I think our fans and our players love to play it up.”
[Source: Games Industry]
