Being in charge of over 6,000 game developers is no small amount of responsibility, but that’s exactly where EA’s Laura Miele finds herself these days. As the company’s Chief Studios Officer, she has a lot to say about the challenges of the role, the delicate balancing act of assessing company priorities and player feedback over the last few years, and her hopes and plans for the future.
Since her start working for Westwood Studios, creator of the much-loved Command and Conquer series, Miele has had 25 years of experience working with game developers, and professes an “appreciation and admiration” for the work that they do according to an interview with IGN’s Rebekah Valentine. A good choice then, it would seem, as the person who now oversees the running of EA’s internal development studios and sees herself as the conduit between those developers, the higher-ups at EA, and even the legions of fans who want to make their opinions known too.
One way she manages to maintain that equilibrium is by relinquishing more creative control to the studios themselves, rather than handing down diktats from on high. The recent announcement of Anthem‘s cancellation may have been a disappointment, but it freed up developers at BioWare to work on their other flagship franchises including Dragon Age and Mass Effect, while Apex Legends developer Respawn holds the reins for the next steps for the Titanfall universe entirely in its own hands. “I don’t believe in directing or telling games teams what to create,” Miele says. “It has to come from the player community, and the inspiration and motivation of developers.”
The other main aspect to her approach, as she alludes to when talking about the developers, is in bringing the fans and the gaming community at large into the discussion. She cites player feedback and input as a major factor in the company’s decisions to revisit series like Skate and Command and Conquer. It also seemingly informed choices such as developing new, free content for Star Wars Battlefront 2 and going ahead with the upcoming Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.
At the end of the day, though, Miele admits that it’s not entirely a free-for-all at EA. As the parent company, it ultimately holds the final say over any business decisions, which includes making the call on games that get developed, updated, or canned. “There is a lot of creative autonomy within Electronic Arts but there are certain values and principles we have as a company that we just couldn’t allow to be compromised,” she says. However, even within EA the winds of change may be blowing, as evidenced by their recent decision to drop plans to make the new Dragon Age a live-service game.
By and large, this seems like a positive shift for Electronic Arts. Taking useful feedback from the community on board and offering their subsidiary studios a healthy degree of creative freedom to explore new and old ideas alike may well bring with it a new era of success for one of gaming’s most storied companies.
Source: IGN
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