While EA is largely known as the sports, Battlefield, and Sims factory these days – they also occasionally allow BioWare to release an RPG if the studio does so quietly enough – the studio's catalog includes many, many more franchises. What's going to become of all those IPs after the Saudi Arabia-led buyout of the company? Well, maybe some of them can be sold off to more attentive homes.
That's an idea posited by Emmanuel Rosier, who served as a high-level manager at EA for the better part of a decade, apprising the company of industry and market trends likely to affect their fortunes. Now he's the director of market intelligence at the third-party industry analysis firm Newzoo, and recently spoke to PC Gamer about the situation EA now finds itself in.
"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."
EA's taking $20 billion in debt as part of the buyout, and it's widely expected that mass layoffs are going to be a big part of getting that debt under control. Selling off old IPs could be a way to get the cash flowing in a hurry, and as much of a struggle as it's seemingly been for BioWare to even get Mass Effect 5 made, I have my doubts that anyone's going to be able to convince the higher-ups at EA – never mind the even higher-ups in the new ownership group – to sign off on a big-budget revival of an even older series.
"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," Rosier says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."
I don't know about that whole mobile games idea – the last time EA translated a classic series into a mobile game, we got Command & Conquer: Rivals. That game was, by many accounts, pretty good, but it left traditional RTS fans feeling burned, and the backlash was so severe that EA built a lavish remaster of the original games as something of a make good.
Ultima and Wing Commander, specifically, are every bit as foundational to their respective genres as Command & Conquer is to RTS games, and the fact that they're sitting in some grand EA vault like the artifacts in Raiders of the Lost Ark is hard to swallow. Never mind the likes of SimCity, Burnout, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, SSX, Spore… the list goes on and on.
I'm not one to demand revivals of every old game, as I do think old franchises have often already had their time to shine. But the fact that so many of these games aren't even available on Steam these days, with their legacy left to wonderful fan patches and sketchy abandonware sites, hardly seems right.
Many of the best RPGs available today simply would not exist without Ultima's influence.
