Garriott Brothers Q&A, Part One
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Q: And how was EA as a steward of it when they took over? Did things change a lot when Origin became a part of EA?
Richard: Well, sure. EA is a very large company that has very diverse interests, and in fact their primary business is in sports franchises on consoles. As an organization they have, understandably, different ways of doing business and different kind of motivations
Robert: Some of the good parts about EA is that they have a lot of financial capabilities that as an independent developer we didn't have. And so they were able to spend a lot more time and money on projects, but speaking of time... they have to meet quarterly objectives and stuff that a private company doesn't. So there's good and bad with any situation, but being with Electronic Arts I think actually helped us all develop a lot in terms of just capabilities and design style and stuff like that. And they have a great marketing team, and I think it was a great experience.
Richard: But for online games specifically, once we started doing that, online games are a very unique beast to develop and pace for the public. They're very long cycle developments and they require a very large quantity of staff just to keep them operational. And most of the big publishers, including EA, Microsoft or others even though EA, for example, had Ultima Online under its belt, they've looked at it and gone like, "Wow, that's a very different business than the business that we have over here that in 9 months we can invest in and predict success." This was a riskier, more expensive thing that they weren't as enthusiastic to embrace.
And that's one of the reasons why we decided to go tart our own company and do it. No one else, even though we thought we proved the model with Ultima Online, no one was out there there was Sony Online Entertainment, a division of Sony that was pretty good with some of their products... but that's only one other company. There's really very few major publishers that have been pursuing it, so that allowed us a second "once in a lifetime" opportunity...
