I think I gave away the kicker to the article in the headline but it’s too good to pass up. In a recent interview with industry publication MCV, EA Games Executive Vice President Patrick Soderlund addressed the criticism that EA is just recycling the same old intellectual property every year. Soderlund contends that EA is currently working on at least six new IPs and isn’t planning to stop developing new franchises.

However, Soderlund’s idea of what constitutes a new intellectual property is different that what the rest of the world considers to be a new idea.

Soderlund told MCV, “We are working on a new Mirror’s Edge game, and although that’s not a new IP, it is a revival done in a new way. We are developing Star Wars Battlefront, which to us is a new IP, even though it isn’t technically.”

When I saw Soderlund’s quote that EA was working on six to eight new IP, I wondered why he would answer with a range rather than an answer including the term “at least” or “more than.” Clearly, he answered with a range because he doesn’t seem to know what is actually a new idea or new intellectual property.

I’ll grant Soderlund that Battlefront should be considered a new IP because it’s a new franchise for them. I don’t consider Mirror’s Edge a new IP because that’s an EA/DICE game that they hadn’t done anything with for six years. Just because you decide to reboot an old IP doesn’t make it new again.

So what are the other four to six IPs to which Soderlund refers? Well, Titanfall is certainly one of them. The upcoming EA Sports UFC game would also be a new IP for EA. There are also two new Star Wars games in the works from BioWare and Viseral Games according to April’s announcement of the licensing of the Star Wars IP to EA. That would get us to six. Hopefully, EA’s definition of new IPs doesn’t include something like Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare just because that’s a PVZ game done in a “new way.”

While Soderlund doesn’t seem to know what actually is a new IP, we can take solace in the fact that EA certainly took some risks on new IPs early in the current console generation. At the beginning of the PS3/360/Wii generation, EA released the likes of Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age which are big triple-A new IPs. Sure, Ubisoft gets a lot of well-earned credit for creating new IP but it’s not like EA’s business model is solely releasing annual iterations of their anchor franchise.

Of course, it would be nice if EA would actually tell us what these new IPs are or what genre they even fall under. It’s all well and good to say that you’re working on new games. It’s generally a good idea to give your audience a reason to be excited instead of just suggesting that they should be because you’re making some new games.

Source: MCV

P.S. Yeah, this was a slow news weekend. I’m not a fan of writing non-story articles so I tried dragging some analysis out of it. But tell me what you think of stories like this and if you want more, I can write more.