EA Mobile Head: Dungeon Keeper "Innovated Too much"

Oh, EA, that scallywag.  The company everyone loves to hate!

Personally, I have mixed feelings about EA.  Are they evil?  Sure!  They do lots of evil stuff and they love screwing over their customers in new and exciting ways.  But they seem to only ever get that way when it comes to money—in all matters NOT related to cash, they actually seem to be pretty decent guys.   They’re traditionally very strong supporters of the LGBT community, vocal advocates for getting more women involved in the industry, and they’ve even run extremely successful charitable events for those in need.

But it seems that every gesture of goodwill only exists to offset another act of mindless evil.  Case in point, a little while back we reported on EA CEO Andrew Wilson apologizing for the whole mobile Dungeon Keeper mess, calling it a mistake.   That was good.  Flash forward to present day, however, where we have EA’s head of Mobile Frank Gibeau saying Dungeon Keeper failed because it was too “innovative”, and we have achieved karmic balance once more.

In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Gibeau said the following:

"Dungeon Keeper suffered from a few things.  I don't think we did a particularly good job marketing it or talking to fans about their expectations for what Dungeon Keeper was going to be or ultimately should be. Brands ultimately have a certain amount of permission that you can make changes to, and I think we might have innovated too much or tried some different things that people just weren't ready for. Or, frankly, were not in tune with what the brand would have allowed us to do. We like the idea that you can bring back a brand at EA and express it in a new way. We've had some successes on that front, but in the case of Dungeon Keeper, that just didn't connect with an audience for a variety of reasons."

Now, I’m not a big shot EA executive—if I was, I sure as hell wouldn’t be writing this—but I still have this crazy notion in my head that penny and diming people for every little thing wasn’t so much an insanely original idea as it was stolen from the worst kind of mobile titles from developers nobody’s ever heard of.   Still, the man’s entitled to his opinion.   And he’s certainly not wrong in thinking that brands have a certain level of sacredness that should be respected if you want to avoid spiting fans.

Still, it’s not as if they plan to change the way Dungeon Keeper is operating.  Not while it’s still making them money in any case.