EA says Anthem is on a 7-10-year journey

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has backed BioWare to turn Anthem’s fortunes around after a disappointing start for the game.

In an interview with GameDaily.biz, the executive said EA still has faith in the new IP, which he believes is on a 7-10-year journey.

Simply put, if EA thought any of the major aspects of the game weren’t compelling enough, Wilson said the company “might not invest further”.

“IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles,” he said. “So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”

However, Wilson acknowledged this task won’t be straightforward, and suggested BioWare must “evolve” and “expand” if it’s to satisfy what he sees as two different sets of players who’ve bought into Anthem.

“We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors,” he said. “One was traditional BioWare story driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working in on the elder game.

“At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off. It’s off because I’ve got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well. Oh, by the way I’m used to 100 hours of BioWare story, and that’s not what I got.’ Or, ‘I expected that this game would have meaningfully advanced the action component that we’d seen in games like Destiny before, and I don’t feel like it has.’”

Wilson added: “As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. The teams at BioWare will continue to come to work every day and listen to their players old and new and seek to deliver on the promises they’ve made to those players. That’s what you’re seeing with Anthem today.”