For a long time, EA has been the butt of many jokes about how greedy it can be. Its then-CEO saying he wanted to charge us to reload in Battlefield likely hasn’t helped its reputation. However, Split Fiction director Josef Fares says he thinks the company gets more flack than it deserves.
In an interview that first went out in the Edge newsletter, Fares talks about how much pushback he got at the beginning of his game dev career, but adds “EA definitely never interferes with any of development. And I mean zero.”
Fares has been working with EA since A Way Out, his second game and the first under his own Hazelight Studios. “I’m gonna give EA props for actually believing in, and backing up, the vision,” Fares says. “They never interfere. Sometimes, I think they get so much s**t they don’t deserve. I don’t know how they work with others, but with us it’s super good.”
Considering It Takes Two won game of the year and Split Fiction sold more than one million copies in just two days, I’m not surprised EA just lets Fares and his team do their thing. But it also sounds like Fares is good at standing his ground and sticking up for his creative vision.
“Developers can sometimes struggle with leadership and clear vision,” he says. “Sometimes, I hear a lot of blame [placed] on the publisher, but I think it’s a responsibility for us both… The perfect combination is when the publisher respects the developer and the developer has a clear vision of what they want to do. If that doesn’t exist, then there’s a risk the publisher will take over more and more. You know, there needs to be a perfect symbiosis between them.
“Publishers sometimes fuck up and [make] stupid decisions – ‘we need to do this for the money.’ That’s why I say clearly: no microtransactions, no lootboxes. I think it’s very important to understand that we’re working with creativity. We have to push the medium forward. We can’t implement that shit and, at Hazelight, it will never happen.”
It sounds like Fares has the ideal indie dev/publisher relationship, but those seem rare these days. Hopefully his words help other developers ensure they’re making the most out of their time with big companies.
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