http://www.develop-online.net/features/1067/EAs-leap-of-faith

Taking into consideration what you’ve been saying about the importance of dev autonomy and, elsewhere, the need to add multiplayer to games, what if the Visceral team told you that multiplayer isn’t something that should be added to Dead Space? It’s not something completely unforeseeable, considering its genre.
Well, it’s not only about multiplayer, it’s about being connected. I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going they, need to be connected online. Multiplayer is one form of that. 

Yes but, how would you respond if Visceral told you that Dead Space isn’t the type of game that should have multiplayer? It sounds like EA insists on some game elements, and I am wondering how that affects dev autonomy.
(PR manager: It’s more about educating the developers. Not on the creative side, but on the way people play games. Social media has really changed the way consumers look at entertainment. Everything’s more interconnected and 24-7 these days.)

Gibeau: So I don’t go up to every game team and ask – what is your deathmatch mode? [laughs] I look at how to make games a broader idea with online services.

I must go back to the question – John Riccitiello described development studios as “flowers in a hot house”, in that you change the temperature by a couple of degrees and all the flowers die. Do studios care if you tell them a game needs, for example, social networking elements?
No, it’s about collaboration – looking at being both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. It’s both, and I like to give studios a lot of creative autonomy, and that’s certainly proven by the types of games we’ve brought out over the last couple of years.

I mean, EA used to be against M-rated content. Go check out Dead Space [laughs]. It’s one of my core cultural studio values to allow developers to decide more on what they want to build. And a studio’s creative call needs to be balanced against a commercial imperative, and if you look at online these days – that’s the place to be.

Game makers, the really good ones, they want to make great games but they also want to make blockbusters. One of the things they need to do is balance that out – I have the right team to help them.

I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished.

Online is where the innovation, and the action, is at.

My point was that you want to keep these studios creatively independent, but at the same time you have to insist on certain features, such as online. It’s the friction between those two that I was enquiring about.
Well you say ‘insist’, I say inspire. What I learned early on in my career was that, if you’re going to lead a creative team, you have to inspire people. They’re the ones living in the game.

I always found it a big problem when a game’s executive producer would come up to me and ask what I should do next. I would always respond that’s not my job. You’re job is to come up with the creative vision, mine is to edit and tweak so it’s a bigger commercial opportunity. I’m very clear about that.

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A good read, and I agree that games going forward will need to be connected somehow to stay competetive in the long run. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of this strategy for a singleplayer game I think.

I'm also glad to see that EA are doing so much to foster good environments for their developers to be creative in.

But...but...weren't the best selling games this generations offline? And don't they keeps selling better than online games?

Online or single player only, the larger, abstract question is what draws players to buy your game? Is it the epicly produced, long waited for single player experience to die for as Final Fantasy 7 was? Is it the game that starts out as a friend pass, but comes to consume your life like the World of Warcraft? Is it the competitive online experience where burger flippers can pwn CEOs in Call of Duty: Black Ops?

I don't think gaming has reached a point yet where all games from December 8, 2010 onward all have to have an online option otherwise they won't sell. I don't see it in wake of Fallout: New Vegas selling comfortable numbers.

For 2 years straight I played nothing but the World of Warcraft. During that time I bounced from guild to guild, changed servers and only started to seriously play with others to raid my last 8 months playing the game. Well over half my time playing the World of Warcraft was a single player experience punctuated with me screaming at my own team in PvP battlefields and being one of cool guys with my guild during a raid where I got all the loot I wanted because I was the only hunter amongst 6 death knights, 1 tank (usually a paladin), and 2 healers (druid and priest)

What people forget when they hail online gaming is many, including myself, at times will play it as if they are playing a single player game. When I log on to play a round in Bad Company 2, I do not wait 30 minutes much less 1 minute to find a friend or two to play with. Hell, I don't even play for them, I play so I can wrack up some kills and enjoy the quick action. When I played FarmVille, it was a selfish desire to create my perfect farm and I only helped my friend's farms because I was rewarded for it. Take out the reward and I would never vist their farms.

If you think online option is the future, then you have to expect and accomodate for a sizeable number of your playerbase to play it as if it was a single player experience.

You're not reading what he said, he's saying that the games that are created, put out the door and never touched again by the developer are done.

Mass Effect 2 is connected online, it got plenty of DLC and support. It's not connected as in having multiplayer, it's connected as in something the developers continue to support and add to, whether that's in singleplayer or multiplayer.

Why? They are gone? Gaming has always worked well without developers patching everything up until now. I don't see why would it be over.

Not that I completely disagree, but reading between the lines make me feel that they intentionally or not eager to make true their wet dream, i.e. make service out of games, make service out of what suppose to be a product first and foremost. I bet EA or any third party would have been even more happy if we do not buy, but rent games. I don't like the trend, I don't even like the whole concept of gaming service instead of actual games full of appealing content.

Because we're coming into an age where the internet is more prevalent than ever. It's not about patching things up to the right and left, he's saying that games that are just created and pushed out the door without developers ever coming back to it are ending.

And he's not saying that they're gone now, he's saying they're on the way out.

Games have always worked well, and they're constantly improving.

That development perspective didn't contribute to significantly higher sales for ME2, though.

I think we can take this as being in the context of EA games, because for some developers (like the elephant) this isn't going to be true this gen or the next one, if ever.

Rather disagree. A great game is a timeless thing in and of itself, and if you would focus on greatness in the initial product, you wouldn't need peripheral concerns

No, but I'm sure they made a tidy profit on the DLC. If devs can continue to support games with DLC, then money will keep coming in (unless they release it for free).