Call of Duty Elite has managed to attract a lot of attention, and that has not gone unnoticed by Electronic Arts. The publisher of Battlefield would consider a subscription service of their own for their premier shooter franchise.
“I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking at that,” said EA Games label head Patrick Soderlund. “Like all other companies, we’re looking at how we can maximize our investment in this and get the most out of our investment and get more people playing this product. That may take us to different places, but we’re not really talking about where that is yet.”
“When it comes to taking Call of Duty down, you know what I don’t look at it like that. We are in this business because we want to make the best possible products. Call of Duty is a shooter, but it’s a different shooter. And I think they have a market; we have a market. I’m fine with what I’m doing,” he continued. “I’m going to continue innovating and doing as best as I can with my teams. Hopefully that’s going to lead us to more units [sold] and more happy consumers.”
This move signals a general change in games towards a service model. “We look at it as a 24/7 service. We have people in Stockholm and North America and other parts of the world that are on this every single hour of every single day. 365 days a year,” Soderlund said. “We have an operations team at DICE to look at telemetry data. How are people playing the game, how can we improve the experience Are they having problems Are servers down Are they up All that stuff.”
When asked about how the franchise experience was improved for Battlefield 3, Soderlund said, “Quality will come from many things, in many ways. A lot of people point to Battlefield 3, and they talk about the Frostbite technology. We made a conscious decision to invest in new technology. We realized that technology is going to be the enabler that gets us over the hump, so to speak, into this next generation of products. We didn’t build tech for the sake of building tech. We looked at it and said, ‘We need to provide the consumer with a different kind of teamwork experience and to do so we need new technology.’ We identified certain areas; we looked at things that break the illusion of reality. For us it was animation. We needed to take a giant leap in animation, and we did that.”
“We looked at something that a lot of people tend to forget, which is audio. We said, ‘We need to do a lot better at audio than we have,’ he detailed. “We invented what we call the High Dynamic Range audio, which is what you hear in the Frostbite engine. And lastly, we also said, ‘We need a much higher-fidelity rendering engine and a much better destruction system.’ ”
Source: VentureBeat
