Clearly, staying true to the spirit of an IP is hard… really hard. Some developers do manage, such as Firaxis’ excellent remake of XCOM. But most will fail miserably, like Aliens: Colonial Marines. It’s time then, to look at what actually ensures these remakes and IP games are actually true to the franchise.

A website for a MOBA called Dawngate has appeared overnight, offering a chance to be a part of a MOBA that “looks and feels familiar while offering a whole new way to experience MOBA gameplay”.

“Dawngate empowers you to forge the champions you love for the roles you want in a competitive arena,” claims the site, “shaped by ever-evolving, community-driven content and story.” And, well… that’s all there is to know so far, other than the fact that EA have signed on to publish it.

You can hit up the official site to sign up for beta, or perhaps mine meticulously through the source code for clues. With EA on board though, I should think we’ll be hearing more about this next month at E3. Stay tuned.

Source: Blue’s News

EA have announced that they will no longer be moving forward with the online pass system, despite being one of the most ardent supporters of the idea. Why? Well, because you demanded it.

“None of our new EA titles will include that feature,” said EA’s John Reseburg in an interviee with VentureBeat.

“Initially launched as an effort to package a full menu of online content and services, many players didn’t respond to the format. We’ve listened to the feedback and decided to do away with it moving forward.”

However, Reseburg did emphasise that EA was “still committed to creating content and services that enhance the game experience well beyond the day you first start playing,” which presumably means multiplayer, DLC and other various add-on components.

Source: VentureBeat (Thanks, Stefan)

Following the news that EA had signed an exclusive deal with Disney to give them the rights to all Star Wars games, the company is now opening a new DICE studio in California to focus entirely on Star Wars games.

The new studio is expected to grow to 60 employees by the end of this year, and is aimed at directly competing with Treyarch, who operate out of the same city.

“There is an extreme talent pool over [there] that we want a part of,” said DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s no secret that our main competitor is there.”

A number of former Medal of Honor: Warfighter developers are already on board and the studio is hiring for their first title.

Source: WSJ (paywalled) via Gamasutra

Most games companies operate under license from gun manufacturers when it comes to displaying their weapons in-game; signing contracts that allow their use in line with the gun owners right to receive royalties for their trademarks. Now, however, EA have announced that they’re not going to be doing that anymore.

So does that mean they’re moving away from violent games which use realistic guns — especially in the wake of the recent controversies with the Medal of Honor: Warfighter site actually linking to arms manufacturer sites where you could purchase your own guns? Nope! They’re still going to be using the same, real-world brands, but they’re just… not going to pay for the rights anymore.

EA is now asserting fair use rights, claiming that the company has no need to pay for something if they’re displaying it in a reasonable, real-world manner. “We’re telling a story and we have a point of view,” said EA’s Frank Gibeau to Reuters. “A book doesn’t pay for saying the word ‘Colt,’ for example.”

Reuters also noted that there hasn’t been a single case so far when a gun manufacturer has sued a game maker for using their firearms without a license.

Source: Reuters via PC Gamer

The latest financials are in from gaming’s two biggest names, with results generally positive for both Activision and EA. Digital revenue grew strongly for both companies, showing an increasing trend towards digital sales over brick-and-mortar releases.

Activision reported that World of Warcraft subscriptions were down to 8.3 million, having lost 1.3 million across the Asian market. However, even at 8.3 million World of Warcraft is still the strongest subscription MMO on the market. Heart of the Swarm was the number one PC gaming for Q4 with 1.1 million copies sold in just two days, and Skylanders Giants and Black Ops 2 were the number one and two games in North America and Europe combined.

Meanwhile over at EA, SimCity has shifted over 1.6 million units with “nearly 50% of those sales were high-margin digital downloads”. Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3 sales came in “below expectations”, but FIFA 13 sold 14.5 million units this financial year and produced digital revenue up 94% over its last installment.

Battlefield Premium subscriptions are now at 3.5 million, and have generated over $120 million in revenue for the company.

Source: VG247, here and here

If you ever thought EA might stop producing Battlefield games, maybe, one day, in the future… well, nope. In fact, they’ve just gone and registered all the domains for everything from Battlefield13.com up to Battlefield20.com.

Unfortunately, some quick-thinking squatters own the rights to Battlefield10.com, Battlefield11.com and Battlefield12.com. But we’re sure EA can come to some arrangement.

As Blue’s News points out, if EA follows the current pattern of releases, Battlefield 20 will be out some time in 2077. So we’ve probably got a while to wait to see how this all pans out.

Source: Fusible via Blue’s News.

Disney and EA have signed an exclusive deal for the production of Star Wars games, with their studios at DICE, Visceral and BioWare tagged to be involved in the production of future titles.

While the amount of money that changed hands was not disclosed, EA did reveal in a further blog post that the Frostbite 3 engine would be used for all new Star Wars titles. EA has almost total rights to game production, but Disney has reserved the right to develop games “within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories”.

There is no official mention of what will happen to Star Wars 1313, so that title — and any others in development at LucasArts when Disney pulled the plug — will have to remain a mystery. Obsidian’s dream of pitching a new Star Wars RPG is probably over, however.

Source: Businesswire and EA

One of the  industry’s largest businesses appears to be undergoing what is euphemistically known as ‘restructuring’. According to Kotaku’s sources, the publisher of mega hits like Battlefield and Mass Effect may be terminating as much as 10% of its total workforce.

As reported by Game Informer, multiple sources within the company have indicated that EA is winding up its Partners program. Under the Partners initiative, EA has distributed a range of third party titles, including Crysis and Left4Dead. EA is also said to be closing two of its development teams, casual gaming specialist PopCap Vancouver and Quicklime Games, best known for its work on the Need For Speed series.

EA has thus far proved to be less than forthcoming regarding the extent of the layoffs, conceding only that it has been forced to make “some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations”. We have requested more detail from EA and will update this story should we receive it.

Source: Kotaku and Game Informer

Earlier this month, EA announced that you could download free Nissan LEAF DLC into SimCity. Now they’ve announced a new DLC: exclusive tourist attractions which you can redeem from codes only available on certain Oral-B and Crest products. Yet SimCity is still a buggy, broken game. We need to ask some questions.

Which is actually meant to be a positive thing, at least according to BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. Speaking to Games Industry International, Zeschuk said that “The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself.”

Zeschuk, who departed the company last year to focus on making beer, claims he “definitely rejects” the idea that EA forced the company to include microtransactions, DLC, and multiplayer.

“It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that’s something to remember – while we were independent we didn’t have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like ‘wow we can do all this stuff.’ We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.”

“We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn’t like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly,” he said.

Source: Games Industry International

EA has taken out The Consumerist’s ‘Worst Company in America’ award for the second year in a row — the first time any company has done so in the history of the poll.

The game publisher edged out the Bank of America, Comcast and Walmart to claim the prize, taking an astonishing 78% of the final vote against the Bank of America.

Today’s announcement comes on the back of a heartfelt message by EA COO Peter Moore in which he claimed that the company had made a number of mistakes but was dedicated to fixing them and doing better.

In response, The Consumerist itself issued a strongly-worded rebuttal, saying that EA was shifting the blame to homophobes and “whiny Madden fans” rather than addressing the real reasons that people voted for EA, including dissatisfaction over broken games and microtransaction models.

Source: The Consumerist