Axios Gaming

A career loaded with hits has led to an expanded portfolio — and added pressure — for EA executive Vince Zampella, whose team released Star Wars Jedi: Survivor to stellar reviews last week.

Why it matters: Zampella is helping reforge EA’s rep as a game maker after years of the mega-publisher’s under-achievement in creating games in key categories, including Star Wars.

Be smart: Jedi: Survivor comes from one of the teams at Respawn Entertainment, the studio co-founded by Zampella that EA purchased in 2017.

• It follows Respawn and EA’s 2019 hit Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which sold more than 10 million copies, rewriting EA’s battered rep on Star Wars games and, according to Zampella, exceeding internal expectations.

State of play: Respawn is now developing at least two more Star Wars games — a strategy title made in concert with new studio Bit Reactor and a first-person shooter made in-house.

• Respawn operates Apex Legends, a battle royale game launched in 2019 that remains one of the few viable competitors to Epic’s Fortnite.
• And while it is not working on a sequel to its beloved Titanfall franchise (it would love to but nothing's in the works, Zampella tells Axios), that series’ game director, Steve Fukuda, is leading a “very small,” “skunkworks” team at Respawn: “The mission is to find the fun in something new.”
• Oh, and in December 2021, EA put Zampella in charge of its repeatedly underperforming Battlefield military shooter franchise to turn it around.

What they’re saying: “At the end of the day, it's interactive entertainment, so that interactive portion has to feel good,” Zampella tells Axios, drawing a throughline across his teams’ many successful games.

• “The story can be great, and it has to be great, especially in Star Wars, right? But if it doesn't feel good, who cares?”

Catch up fast: Zampella didn’t get this amount of responsibility by accident.

• In 2002, after making Medal of Honor games for EA, Zampella formed a new studio, Infinity Ward, which created Call of Duty for EA rival Activision.
• Through sequels and refinement, IW made Call of Duty one of the biggest and most influential gaming series of all time.
• An acrimonious split with Activision led Zampella to co-found Respawn, where the team made Titanfall and then pitched EA a Star Wars game, initially rejected, that became Fallen Order.

Yes, but Respawn has seen a string of departures, including its co-founder and top Apex Legends developers in the last year, forming new studios outside of EA.

• “We’ve had an abnormally low rate of turnover, so this is just more in line with what you see realistically in the industry,” he said.
• Zampella attributes some of the exits to talented developers wanting to try new things and the limits on how many projects can be greenlit at the company.

Between the lines: Survivor was developed mostly while its developers worked remotely due to the pandemic. It had been delayed from a planned March release because “it just wasn’t ready,” Zampella says.

• Reviews have been strong, though the game runs poorly on some PCs, sending EA and Respawn rushing to promise patches to fix performance.
• It’s an iterative sequel that expands and improves many aspects of Fallen Order, offering more dynamic combat options, more acrobatic moves for its playable Jedi and a much larger set of sci-fi worlds to explore.
• “It's not just about telling the second part of the story,” Zampella says of the sequel. “It's about refining what you do.”

Getting EA's Battlefield in a good spot is one of Zampella's biggest challenges.

• He is working with former Call of Duty exec Byron Beede and a revamped and expanded set of studios to put the series in a strong spot.

Why it matters: Battlefield is supposed to be a marquee military shooter franchise for EA, but launches over the last several years have been shaky.

It's best not to think of it simply as a Call of Duty competitor, Zampella says.

• It has a “specialness around the squad play” and “those only-in-Battlefield moments where you can kind of see something come together where it just blows your mind.”
• “I can't really say too much, just because we're not really talking about it yet, but there's a lot that we can do there.”

Sony expects to sell 25 million PlayStation 5s in the 12 months ending March 31, 2024, the company’s CEO told investors Friday.

• That’s 6 million more than it sold in the prior year and would be the most PlayStations ever sold in a year since Sony got into gaming in the 1990s.
• PS5 supply chain issues are fading, while demand remains strong.

Why it matters: Sony is on a roll this generation, posting rising quarterly PS5 unit sales in the same week Microsoft announced a 30% drop in year-on-year Xbox consoles sold.

Yes, but: Sony is projecting lower first-party game sales for the year and largely flat sales from third-party game makers.

• That’s despite some massive launches ahead, including the PS5-only Final Fantasy XVI from SquareEnix and Activision Blizzard’s multiplatform Diablo IV.
• Sony’s only announced first-party title for the next year is Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

💰 "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" has exceeded $1 billion in global box office, Variety reports. The movie keeps getting posted to Twitter, where one version was viewed more than 9 million times, according to The Verge.

☁️ Microsoft has signed another 10-year cloud gaming commitment, this time to stream Activision Blizzard games to European platform NWare, should Microsoft’s $69 billion bid for the game maker clear regulatory hurdles.

• U.K. regulators blocked the deal last week over cloud gaming concerns, saying such deals were too narrowly defined.
• European Commission regulators’ decision on whether to approve the deal is expected by May 22.

😲 The impact of Xbox Game Pass is evident in new player stats for Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo’s Wo: Long Fallen Dynasty, which has sold more than 1 million copies and drawn nearly 4 million players. Since its March 2023 launch, the game has been available at no added cost to Game Pass subscribers.

☹️ Waypoint, Vice’s gaming subsite that focused on the people and culture of video games, was shut down last week by its struggling digital media parent. The loss was swiftly mourned. (Disclosure: Current and former Waypoint staff worked for me and did great work, as far as I’m concerned.)

One game publisher says it has spent $660 million developing one of its games, plus another $550 million spent on marketing costs.

• That’s according to anonymized industry disclosures included in the U.K.’s Competition & Markets Authority’s decision (section 9.19) to block the Microsoft-Activision deal (via IGN).

Why it matters: Games are getting really expensive to make, though it’s rare to see the price tag.

• Other top publishers reported development budgets ranging from $80 million to $350 million.

Be smart: A timeline of game development costs published in Kotaku in 2014 showed the dollars spent making a game rise from seven figures in the 1990s to the high eight figures in the 2010s.

• As that outlet notes now, rising development costs intensify the financial risks tied to blockbuster games and incentivize conservative creative directions.