Formed from ex-Infinity Ward developers, Respawn Entertainment are hard at work on an upcoming shooter that’s published by EA. Sadly it didn’t make an appearance at EA’s E3 press event, but after the show EA Games Label President, Frank Gibeau, let new some details slip.
In an E3 meeting this morning, Gibeau said that the publisher will “continue to follow [their] rotation strategy” for its FPS franchises, but “do it in a way that allows [them] to maximise technology investment”. That means that EA will alternate Medal of Honor and Battlefield releases on an annual basis, and release Respawn Entertainment’s project when it sees an “opportunistic” window.
In general we’re going to continue to follow our rotation strategy of giving studios a full two-year cycle to get a game built and polished to maximum quality, but we’re going to do it in a way that allows us to maximise technology investments like Frostbite 2, the online service models that we’re doing… we’re going to be able to trade team knowledge and increase the quality of the products year in, year out.
The idea is to have that rotation happen with Battlefield and Medal of Honor and keep it fresh so you don’t burn the teams down or over-annualise the product lines.
Titles like Respawn – and I think the Insomniac title is a little bit more of an action game than a pure shooter – we’ll sprinkle those in where we see opportunistic gaps, either in a release schedule or in a genre standpoint.
Adding:
Those typically are more sci-fi oriented shooters, where as the Medal of Honor and Battlefield brands are obviously more modern military oriented.
So it allows us to pick and choose the best of the sci-fi shooters. It allows us to compete with things like Gears and Halo and put them on places in our release calendar where they’re not cannibalistic to the core business and that’s the essential strategy going forward.
With neither Halo or Gears on the PS3, Killzone is the only major sci-fi shooter franchise on the console, so it would be great to see another shooter on our favorite machine.
[Via]
