Anthem's rocky launch hasn't dissuaded EA, says CEO

"BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. [...] That's what you're seeing with Anthem today.”

-Andrew Wilson discusses the trajectory of BioWare's Anthem in an interview with GameDaily

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson covered a wide breadth of topics in a recent interview with GameDaily, including the company’s stance on games as a service and its ongoing support of Anthem.

Specifically, on the note of BioWare’s looter-shooter Anthem, Wilson says that the world and the IP is compelling enough where a rocky start to the franchise isn’t enough to make EA to walk away from the property or its developers.

“IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles,” Wilson tells GameDaily. “So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they've demonstrated that they can.”

Earlier in the interview, he pointed out that one issue the game had experienced in testing was that the specific kinds of players that gravitated to BioWare games or toward online action-adventure games often had different needs that didn’t quite align in the way the company had anticipated.

For BioWare specifically, Wilson says Anthem is an example of the EA-owned studio’s need to grow and evolve past the brand and expectatons it has in the minds of different generations of players.

“What the BioWare teams are thinking about is that we're going to build a lot of different types of games. We're going to have our core BioWare audience that's been with us for a really long time,” says Wilson. “There are kids today who are 12 years old who weren't around when BioWare started making games… and they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they've grown up in.”

“As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. The teams at BioWare will continue to come to work every day and listen to their players old and new and seek to deliver on the promises they've made to those players. That's what you're seeing with Anthem today.”

The full story on GameDaily is quite a read, but captures Wilson’s thoughts and perspectives on everything ranging from loot boxes and layoffs to cloud-based game services and the future of the industry itself.