During EA’s earnings call yesterday, CEO Andrew Wilson revealed that BioWare’s new action IP, which is “built around a live service,” has been delayed into Fiscal Year 2019 (April 2018 to March 2019). According to Wilson, the delay is because they’ve decided to add more to the disruptive new social designs:
Looking forward, we will continue our aggressive pace of innovation through experiences that capitalize on our technology, network and creativity. We are very pleased with the progress of our new action IP from BioWare. The design is stunning, gameplay mechanics are excellent, and the action will be exhilarating. This game is built around a live service, and through our creative process, we’ve decided to add more to the disruptive new social designs for our players. To accommodate that, we are moving the launch date for this project into Fiscal Year 2019.
Later in the call, CFO Blake Jorgensen briefly talked about BioWare’s IP. “We’re very excited about this opportunity for a new franchise and we want to further develop the live service component,” he said.
In the Q&A portion of the call, Wilson said the overall “aggregate review scores [for Mass Effect Andromeda] were lower than we would have liked,” but over 100 reviewers did score it at 80 or higher.
Wilson added that EA has strong expectations for the Mass Effect franchise, and the reception of Andromeda didn’t have anything to do with BioWare’s IP being delayed:
We’re very happy with kind of how BioWare is doing, how BioWare is treating Mass Effect. And our expectations for Mass Effect are still strong for the future and the franchise overall.
In terms of the new IP, the choice to move the new IP and what happened with Mass Effect are completely unrelated. The realities is we have a creative process. As a company, creativity and pioneering is really important for us.
He finished up his thought on BioWare by saying, “And so we’re very happy with BioWare. BioWare has continued to support Mass Effect, and the new team is doing some amazing things, and you’ll hear more about that in the months to come.”
[Source: Seeking Alpha]
