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That seems to be the official word, right from the mouth of EA Games president Frank Gibeau.

Well, okay, he actually had this to say:

“If you want to make a hit, you have to give a game time to get to quality,” the exec told Develop. “The days of licensed-based, 75-rated games copies are dead like the dinosaur.”

..

“Considering the total amount of money we have to spend on those types of James Bond games, and the total amount of man-hours we had to put into them, we thought; hell, let’s work on our own IP.”

He added: “The guys who made James Bond games for us, well yeah, they went on and made Dead Space. And look where we are now; what would you rather publish, retail and play – the latest James Bond or Dead Space 2?”

There’s a bit of a shot across Activision’s bow there, eh?

Electronic Arts has been moving away, over the last couple of years, from development models that impose too-tight deadlines on game developers, and in a way this move on their part is simply an extension of that philosophy: a game which is made based on a movie can’t come out a year after the film airs; it has to arrive either a bit before or a bit after the relevant film.

Of course, as we Ultima fans know all too well, the price that is paid for pushing a game out the door to meet a too-tight deadline is a pretty steep one to pay. The risk is that the game will be lackluster and feel unpolished; in the worst-case scenario, it’ll also be a bug-ridden nightmare. (Do I need to cite examples? I doubt it.)

Now, granted, giving developers an extra year or two won’t ensure that the game to be released will be phenomenal; there is not a rock-solid correlation between development time and game quality. I’m fully expecting that Duke Nukem Forever will…er…be of average quality (at best), despite its long development timeline. In general, though, holding a brutally short deadline over a developer’s head is a pretty sure-fire way to ensure that the quality of the resultant game will be…less than it could have been. And it’s nice to see EA reaffirming its (still refreshingly new) stance in favour of giving developers a bit more time to work.