Yesterday, GamesBeat reported that Electronic Arts opened a new studio named DICE L.A. in Los Angeles. The publisher told us yesterday that the team is going to work on Battlefield games. Now we know exactly which Battlefield game that is.

DICE L.A. is working on Battlefield 4. Several sites yesterday echoed a Wall Street Journal report that the developer would focus on Star Wars games. That isn’t entirely the case, according to EA.

“With regards to DICE L.A., they are an extension of DICE Sweden and are working on the same projects across both locations,” EA PR director Pete Nguyen told GamesBeat. “Both teams are 100 percent focused on Battlefield 4.”

This is similar to the arrangement Ubisoft has with its multiple studios all working on Assassin’s Creed games. For example, that publisher has six development teams listed in the credits for Assassin’s Creed III.

As for the reports that DICE L.A. will focus on Star Wars — “focus” is a bit misleading.

“We recently announced that with our Star Wars license agreement, DICE and Visceral will join BioWare in developing future Star Wars games using our Frostbite engine,” said Nguyen. “As DICE in Sweden works on Star Wars so too will DICE in L.A.”

It’s also worth noting that just about all of the people who list “DICE L.A.” as their employer on LinkedIn also worked on developer Danger Close’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Lead artist Chris Healy, senior designer Richard Starr, senior level artist Daniel Sundberg, and lead UI designer David Sirland from Danger Close have all now moved on to take similar roles at DICE L.A.

In January, EA mothballed the Medal of Honor franchise after the last two entries in the franchise sold sluggishly compared to Call of Duty and Battlefield. It seems like Danger Close was similarly put on ice.

“Medal of Honor is on hiatus,” PR representative Tammy Levine told GamesBeat. “Some of the most passionate and talented members of that team have joined DICE L.A. Most others have moved on from EA.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — In a hail of faux gunfire, Electronic Arts unveiled Battlefield 4 at a special event Tuesday evening during the Game Developers Conference. And EA has finally given its stakeholders a glimpse into whether it still has a bright future in video games or not.

Based on the polished gameplay trailer (here’s our preview) that EA showed last night, the giant independent video game publisher is betting an awful lot on this game franchise. Battlefield 4 represents a huge investment by EA in a video game that feels like a next-generation experience, and consumers may have to invest in new hardware to play it. Battlefield 4 intends to make players feel as if they were completely immersed in a modern combat battle. This kind of game — coming this fall — is so important that it could make a difference for EA’s valuation in the stock market.

If EA messes the game up, as it did with last fall’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter first-person shooter last year, then it will lose another battle for consumers with rival Activision Blizzard. But if it pulls Battlefield 4 off flawlessly, it could sell millions more units than its predecessor did and take some market share from rival Call of Duty. EA has had more than 65 million people play its Battlefield games over the past decade. That represents sales in the billions of dollars.

“When they told me their vision for this game, with characters, I had a hard time believing them, frankly,” said EA executive vice president Patrick Soderlund in an interview with GamesBeat. “They showed me a snippet of a character interaction that made me wonder if we could really do this now. I found it to be more filmic, more dramatic, and more believable than anything I have seen. That is when I felt I had to support them on this idea. This could be really freaking big.”

Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said today that the first-person shooter market is about 25 percent of the game business, generating around $4 billion in revenue per year. Activision’s Call of Duty games grab at least a billion dollars of that amount in their first two weeks on the market alone. EA, however, has had to be aggressive against its rival’s much bigger marketing and development resources.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Electronic Arts executive vice president Patrick Soderlund

For this game, EA has created a new version of the Frostbite engine, which renders the game world and its 3D animated combat sequences. Soderlund said that EA has an engine team that has created Frostbite 3, and it also has multiple other teams of game designers that are contributing to Battlefield 4. Soderlund said EA invested more in its tool chain. That helped it get around bottlenecks and enabled the team to get to playable versions of the prototype game more quickly.

EA also had to invest in better storytelling, and the demo is paced in a way that shows it has learned a few tips from Hollywood. The scene starts with a combat team in hiding, being hunted by enemies. They have to quietly move toward escape, and then all hell breaks loose as they are discovered. Some scenes show soldiers making tough life-or-death choices, and those scenes seem more like segments of a movie than a game.

In Battlefield 4, EA says players will feel what it’s like to eject from a jet fighter or take out an enemy during a free-fall.

But EA unanswered questions still. Soderlund would not say which platforms Battlefield 4 would debut upon. We saw it on a high-end custom PC, but it will likely be available on the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s next game console, which are both expected in the coming year or so. If EA can get Battlefield 4 on as many platforms as possible, it will be able to sell a lot more copies. But it may not be able to get the game to run on older machines.

“It’s obviously a big investment for EA and it is now a mega-franchise in this industry,” Soderlund said. “We need to keep pushing the boundaries so the consumers respect and love what we do. We will spend as much money as we need to make it successful.”

But Soderlund made it clear that current-generation technology can’t really run the new Battlefield in all of its glory. Soderlund said that the gameplay in the video does not use any sleight of hand that makes it appear better than it actually will be when it comes out. (He didn’t say when it would come out, but EA said in a press release that Battlefield 4 will come out this fall). Soderlund would not say if EA would make a new Battlefield game every year, as Activision does with Call of Duty. That is particularly important since last fall’s Medal of Honor sold so poorly that it was taken “out of rotation.”

“We are at a point in gaming where we can deliver an experience that is a lot more filmic, more human,” Soderlund repeated when asked what the team is trying to accomplish. “I saw people walking out saying that they felt like they were watching a movie.”

The event took place in a movie theater, filled to the brim with journalists and special guests, in the Metreon complex in San Francisco, near the Game Developers Conference base at Moscone Center. Just how important was this event to EA? All of EA’s top executives were there. John Riccitiello, the former CEO of EA, was fired last week. But he was on hand at to cheer on the team.

“John had a tremendous contribution to Electronic Arts and he was a supporter of what we do,” Soderlund said. “It was very appropriate for him to be here.”

Soderlund said Riccitiello was an “honored guest” and that he fully supported Battlefield 4. Also on hand was Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s game business.

Here’s the full 17-minute demo video below. [To be clear, the demo is a video. But the video was captured from live game play, according to EA].

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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John Riccitiello left Electronic Arts yesterday with a mixed record.

In the nearly six years he led EA, the gigantic video game publisher faced a massive shift in the market, from games primarily sold on physical media and played on consoles to games sold and delivered wirelessly and played on everything from consoles to smartphones and tablets. The market shifted from expensive games you buy and own to free-to-play games that cost nothing to play at first, but which charge you for extras. The market expanded from the living room to mobile devices. Through it all, EA survived — which is more than some of its rivals can say — but it hasn’t exactly thrived.

In this story, we’ll try to recapture the ups and downs of Riccitiello’s tenure at the top of one of the video game industry’s most visible companies, and by the end of it, we’ll sort through the complex picture of his record at EA. We’ll also take a look at where the company is going in the future.

Lessons from success — and failure

Ostensibly, the board fired Riccitiello because he missed his quarterly and annual financial targets. In the past, the board might have excused this, since many companies were in the same boat. But at a time of great change in the video game business, so-so performance is no longer good enough. (EA’s temporary CEO is former chief executive Larry Probst, who is looking for a permanent replacement for Riccitiello.)

Still, it’s too simple to say that Riccitiello was a big screwup. In fact, Riccitiello was in many ways a very successful CEO who guided EA through a very difficult transition. By comparison, rivals such as THQ have crashed on the shoals of the digital gaming revolution while Riccitiello arguably saved EA from such a fate. But to demanding shareholders, merely surviving is not good enough. They want EA to seize the opportunities before it to become the dominant player in digital gaming. And it hasn’t quite done that.

EA declined to make an executive available for an interview for this story. But an EA spokesman said in a statement to GamesBeat, “ In the course of seven years, there’s a lot of puts and takes in that equation – recession, extended console cycle, etc. Beyond the macros, we knew this would be a difficult transition – one that required a great deal of investment in people and infrastructure. We knew that the ROI wasn’t going to be immediate. That said, it’s been more difficult than expected – the turnaround took longer than expected.”

Meanwhile, EA’s chief operating officer, Peter Moore, said on his Facebook page, “[Game news site] Kotaku reveling in what, due to their self-smugness, they don’t realize is a sad day for our industry, which is the platform on which they actually make money. John not only helped propel our company and interactive entertainment into new experiences, thus enticing millions of new people to become ‘gamers,’ his work leading the [Entertainment Software Association] in recent years has helped ensure that we don’t experience the fate of the music industry. Sad loss for all of us who had the pleasure of working with him as we emerged from The Burning Platform.”

Many rivals have beaten EA in small pieces of the larger industry war. If you can fault the company for anything, it may be for trying to fight too many battles at once.

The publisher didn’t lose all of those battles. In his parting message to his employees, Riccitiello pointed to their successes.

“Personally, I think we’ve never been in a better position as a company,” Riccitiello said. “You have made enormous progress in improving product quality. You are now generating more revenue on fewer titles by making EA’s games better and bigger. You’ve navigated a rapidly transforming industry to create a digital business that is now approximately $1.5 billion and growing fast.”

John Riccitiello’s commencement speech in 2011. (Courtesy of UC Berkeley)

Riccitiello set many things in motion. But giving him credit or assigning blame is a complicated matter, as the execution always lies in the hands of thousands of employees.

It is easy to point to EA’s failures, such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that took so long to finish that the market changed from underneath it, moving from lucrative subscriptions to free-to-play. After six years and perhaps $200 million in development costs, The Old Republic didn’t get the audience that EA had hoped for, and it had to shift to free-to-play to hang on to its players.

The reboot of the first-person military shooter Medal of Honor was a sad failure. More recently, big franchises like Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3 didn’t perform as expected. And the recent SimCity launch — which sold more units faster than any other title in the city-simulation game’s 24-year history — was marred by EA’s failure to provide enough servers for the always-connected game.

On the positive side, EA’s Battlefield military shooter series became a big hit, and FIFA Soccer has become a monstrous franchise, with a large component of digital revenues.

EA’s shares are down 60 percent since Riccitiello began. Shareholders and boards often show no mercy when they fire a CEO, and in this case, they had plenty of failures to point to as reasons to fire Riccitiello, who once told VentureBeat, “I don’t think investors give a shit about our quality.”

“Transitions are painful,” said P.J. McNealy, a longtime game industry follower and analyst at Digital World Research. “Look at Sony and the changes they had in leadership. EA has struggled. THQ has struggled. At some point, there has to be accountability for it. Typically, it’s not any one reason. But EA’s struggles are not limited to just this quarter.”

But it’s easy at a time like this to forget about Riccitiello’s successes and how each failure was also rich with learning.

“I’ve had first-hand experience with failure, and I have had the opportunity to learn and recover from it,” Riccitiello said in a speech at his alma mater, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, in 2011.

He’ll have plenty of time to ponder the lessons he learned at EA now.

In its own statement defending Riccitiello’s record, EA said to GamesBeat, “Our definition of turnaround swung on how quickly we could transition from the packaged goods model to digital goods and services. John made it clear that this was life or death. The dissolution of THQ this year makes it clear how right he was. By every measure, the turnaround is happening. As noted in an earnings call, this is the last year that digital revenue will be under 50 percent of EA’s total. One example is the first two weeks of [digital] sales for SimCity were just under 45 percent, and we expect the percentage will go even higher. Riccitiello’s turnaround is an article of faith inside EA – if it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be in business today.”

Riccitiello’s first tour of duty at EA

Riccitiello joined EA as chief executive in 2007. It was his second stint at the company. He had previously served as president and chief operating officer from 1997 through April 2004. He left in between to become a co-founder of Elevation Partners, a private equity investment firm that hatched the merger of game developers BioWare and Pandemic.

John Riccitiello (GamesBeat/Dean Takahashi)

In his first tenure, Riccitiello was new to games. He had spent a career in consumer products at companies such as Clorox, Pepsi, Haagen-Dazs, Wilson Sporting Goods, and Sara Lee. Probst hired Riccitiello on the bet that his experience in consumer marketing would pay off at a time when video games were becoming a worldwide mass market. With properties like Madden NFL and FIFA Soccer, EA had become a household name. Its biggest rival today, Activision Blizzard, hadn’t yet been formed.

During Probst’s 16-year tenure as CEO, the company became the undisputed giant of the video game business. EA was the king maker, breaking Sega’s Dreamcast console when it chose not to create games for that platform and making the PlayStation 2 by throwing all of its weight behind Sony’s system. By the time Riccitiello joined, EA was in its glory years, and it was looking at how to further exploit its position as a giant in sports games, licensed movie titles, and online games.

He was a newcomer to games, but Riccitiello immersed himself in them as a player and as a cultivator of talent. Probst, the former chief executive and now the acting CEO again, and Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick have both admitted to not being gamers, or at least not the really hardcore kind. But Riccitiello played games and tried to understand the way they were built. He was sharp and a quick study and formed relationships with key creators.

Riccitiello made contributions, but always as part of a larger executive team. He and studio chief Don Mattrick encouraged the company to get behind Will Wright, who was working on a dollhouse-like title that would later become The Sims, the best-selling EA game series of all time. Riccitiello encouraged his leaders to take risks, egging Neil Young to create a visionary title in Majestic, an early alternate-reality game that turned into a commercial flop. In one case, Riccitiello made a brilliant bet. In the other, the outcome was a dud. These results would be typical of Riccitiello’s life at EA. He could share a vision with marquee developers and get behind them like a zealot. Sometimes it panned out; sometimes it didn’t. But he was always willing to bet big.

Riccitiello’s job was to diversify EA, and he did so through acquisitions of companies like Pogo.com, a casual game website for older, less serious players. EA picked up Westwood Studios, the creator of the Command & Conquer real-time strategy series; and Dreamworks Interactive, the original developer of Medal of Honor. It also bulked up with acquisitions of racing game studios and rode the success of titles based on the Harry Potter books and films. EA stole the James Bond 007 movie-game license from Nintendo, convincing the Hollywood owner that it could take the series multiplatform. Riccitiello and executive Frank Gibeau played a role in that coup. EA came to specialize in multiplatform blockbusters.

The company had become so dominant during the era of the PlayStation 2 that developers feared it would homogenize the industry and drive out all of its creativity. That led some to do everything they could to stay out of EA’s clutches, an issue that persists today. EA’s acquisitions follow a pattern. Some thrive for a while, but as soon as their magic wares off, EA shuts them down and puts its efforts behind another.

And during the run-up of the huge dotcom boom, Riccitiello searched for a way for EA to cash in. After Richard Garriott’s Ultima Online became the first major hit in massively multiplayer online games, Riccitiello started EA.com, a web games business that would be home to a whole collection of MMOs. With these games, EA could keep much more of the profit since it charged subscription fees. Under Riccitiello, EA initiated big-budget online titles like Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond, The Sims Online, and Ultima Online 2.

But the dotcom bubble burst and brought down everything with it. That was a costly lesson. EA wrote off more than $400 million. Of all of the things that Riccitiello had achieved at EA, the failure of EA.com would, fairly or not, become a huge part of his legacy. You could argue that he had been caught up in the Internet wave and that he deserved to be fired for making the wrong bet. But then, you could also fire just about everybody in Silicon Valley, where EA is based, for the same thing.

During Riccitiello’s stay as the No. 2 executive at EA, the company got bigger and stronger. It had setbacks, but that’s entertainment.

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If you’re into action video games, you should be good at playing Where’s Waldo?

Researchers at the University of Toronto say that shooting or driving games improve your ability to search for a target hidden among other distractions in complex scenes. That’s pretty much the definition of Where’s Waldo?

“Recent studies in different labs, including here at the University of Toronto, have shown that playing first-person shooter video games can enhance other aspects of visual attention,” said psychology professor Ian Spence, speaking to Science Daily. “But no one has previously demonstrated that visual search is also improved.”

Searching efficiently and accurately is a good life skill.

“It’s necessary for baggage screening, reading X-rays or MRIs, interpreting satellite images, defeating camouflage, or even just locating a friend’s face in a crowd,” said Spence.

In one experiment, the researchers compared action video game fans and non-players on three visual search tasks. Those who played action games performed better. In the second experiment, 60 non-players played for 10 hours in one or two-hour sessions. Twenty played the shooting game Medal of Honor. Twenty more played the Need of Speed driving game. And 20 played a 3D puzzle game, Ballance. The shooter and driving game players showed improvement in the visual search tasks, but the Ballance players did not.

“But this difference could be a result of a preexisting superiority in experienced gamers compared to those who avoid them,” says Sijing Wu, a PhD candidate in Spence’s lab at the university and lead author of the study. “A training experiment was necessary to establish whether playing an action game could actually improve search skills.”

“We have shown that playing a driving-racing game can produce the same benefits as a shooter game,” says Wu. “This could be very important in situations where we wish to train visual search skills. Driving games are likely to be more acceptable than shooting games because of the lower levels of violence.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Electronic Arts executives John Riccitiello and Peter Moore painted a somber but ultimately optimistic picture of the game industry during an analyst conference call discussing their third-fiscal quarter earnings.

The duo said that gamers are gravitating to blockbuster hits, leaving a lot of losers in the business. And they believe that next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony will help turn around the industry’s sinking retail game sales. These words will be both encouraging and discouraging to other industry players, as EA is so large and diversified that it is a bellwether for the business.

EA’s own strategy has been to weed out its portfolio and focus on its best game properties, such as FIFA Soccer, Madden NFL, and Battlefield. Riccitiello said that the top five games accounted for 40 percent of industry profits in 2011, and they probably accounted for 50 percent of industry profits in 2012. He thinks that FIFA and Battlefield have the chance to be in the top two, though he cautioned that those titles will not account for all of EA’s profits or revenues in the future.

“There is a clear distinction between winners and losers, and in Q3, EA had both,” Moore said.

Moore noted that while overall console game sales in stores have fallen recently, the “standard definition games,” such as those for the Nintendo Wii, have dropped 40 percent in the past year while “high definition games,” such as those made for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, have dropped only about 13 percent in the year. EA focused on the HD games.

EA is investing heavily in a future Battlefield game, but it is showing no mercy to its “losers.” Today, Moore said that EA will take its Medal of Honor property “out of rotation” — essentially canceling it. That means EA will give it a rest, since the latest Medal of Honor: Warfighter, which focused on combat authenticity, was poorly reviewed and didn’t sell well during the holidays. Riccitiello said that the game industry faced “stronger than expected headwinds” during the holiday selling season. For all of 2012, EA believes the console game business grew mid-single-digits.

In a veiled reference to THQ’s bankruptcy sale, Riccitiello said, “The losers are getting hit hard.”

To deal with this, EA has been shifting more investment into “digital games,” such as social, mobile and online games that aren’t sold in retail stores. Digital sales for EA in the past 12 months were $1.5 billion, up 37 percent from a year earlier. That is about 39 percent of EA’s overall sales. Titles such as FIFA Soccer 13 have generated $233 million in digital sales and continue to generate revenues long after the initial game ships to stores.

The industry will face a tough transition to new game consoles soon. The Nintendo Wii U has sold 3 million units, but it isn’t selling like gangbusters.

And Riccitiello said that the start of the “true next generation” game hardware, which Riccitiello calls Gen 4, won’t begin until Nintendo’s rivals, Sony and Microsoft, ship their consoles. Beyond EA’s fourth-fiscal quarter ending March 31, EA sees the “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Digital games will smooth out the revenues until the new consoles come. But sales aren’t big enough yet to offset the gap.

EA said its free-to-play revenue was $185 million, and mobile games (portable, smartphones, and tablets) accounted for $100 million in sales in the quarter. With 1 billion smartphones and 200 million tablets in use, EA believes this part of the market will continue to grow. Subscription, ad, and other digital revenue are growing too.

As for Nintendo, Riccitiello said, “You never count Nintendo out. They have some of the best intellectual property in the industry. When marquee titles arrive, that as when you see the bounce. I am deeply respectful of Nintendo.”

But he added, “I don’t see much correlation between Nintendo results on the Wii U and what we see coming. We see a pretty sharp distinction and are unfortunately unable to go further than that” in commenting on the next-generation consoles.

“A lot of devices come in and represent themselves as the next generation,” he said. “What we are describing as Gen 4 is yet to come. That is what we are excited about and that is what we are investing in.”

EA said it is working on a future Battlefield game, and it is safe to say that the title will be made for the next-generation machines. Frank Gibeau, the executive vice president of EA’s game studios, said the company is about to talk about that game in the next 90 days or so.

One analyst asked what would happen if the next-generation consoles didn’t produce the expected lift for the game business. Riccitiello said that the data on game usage and game revenue is “exceptionally clear.”

“We have added gamers to the universe each year in the last several years, and there is absolutely no sign that is going to slow down,” Riccitiello said. “That’s been driving substantial growth in digital.”

He said EA knows more about the roadmap coming and he said, “With the information we have, we remain bullish.” In the current fiscal year, EA is investing $80 million in the next-generation consoles.

As for Valve’s expected Steam Box Linux-based game console for the living room, Riccitiello said, “I am squarely in the Gabe Newell fan club,” a reference to Valve cofounder Gabe Newell. But he said Valve has not put information out about whether it will be able to compete with the consoles, which he said represented multiple billions of dollars of investment. He said that based on what Valve has said so far, it could be a “cool niche product that appeals to Gabe and his friends and people like me.” But Valve has not “put enough bread crumbs on the ground to tell” EA what path it is on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Although Electronic Arts thinks Medal of Honor deserved better reviews, the publisher doesn’t have any plans to continue the struggling, sometimes controversial series at this time.

During a conference call to investors, EA says it’s removing the military first-person shooter series from its release rotation — effectively canceling the franchise.

“We are in a hits-driven business,” Electronic Arts Labels president Frank Gibeau said on the call. “We missed with Medal of Honor. We take responsibility for that. The rest of the studios performed well. The Medal of Honor miss overshadows those achievements.”

“We’re going to give Medal of Honor a rest while we plan its return,” an EA spokesperson told GamesBeat. “We haven’t made any decision on how or when it will return.”

EA said it has a new Battlefield title coming in the next fiscal year. The publisher is putting a lot of energy into that game.

“The top five games are maybe half of the industry’s profits,” EA chief executive officer John Riccitiello said. “FIFA and Battlefield could be one and two as we transition to what we see coming [for those franchises].”

Prior to this announcement that Medal of Honor series was going dormant, most analysts assumed EA would release a Medal of Honor game and a Battlefield game in offsetting years. This way the publisher could have a major shooter on the market every holiday, but that is obviously not the case. At the same time, EA denied that would annualize the Battlefield series.

Instead, the publisher claimed to have a new plan to have a new shooter each year, but it did not provide details.

EA currently has a publishing agreement with developer Respawn Entertainment, which the former heads of Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward started after leaving Activision.

The rebooted Medal of Honor and its sequel, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, were not hits. Recast in the modern era, these games received mixed reviews and sales that do not compare to the Call of Duty and Battlefield games that it competes with.

EA chief operating officer Peter Moore claimed that gamers couldn’t connect with Medal of Honor’s new focus on realism, although he felt the game deserved better reviews.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Who knew the Department of Defense took operational security so seriously?

Multiple outlets are reporting that the government agency charged with protecting our nation’s secrets – the DoD – is punishing seven active-duty Navy SEALs who consulted on EA’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Four more are under investigation.

The DoD docked the SEALs’ pay for two months and placed letters of reprimand in their file. For all intents and purposes, this could end their careers.

Last month, GamesBeat reported that EA consulted with two dozen active-duty and retired SEALs and other Spec Ops personnel – including Matt Bissonnette, who was part of the Seal Team 6 team that killed Osama Bin Laden – for Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

At the time, EA spokesman Pete Nguyen told GamesBeat, “We are not aware of any rules that oblige EA to vet the game with the Department of Defense, and we don’t know if veterans who consulted on the game have been in contact with the Department of Defense.”

The latter has now been definitively settled. Apparently, the SEALs didn’t follow the normal vetting process, and they’re paying the price.

While civilians aren’t obligated to safeguard classified information – think of it as freedom of the press – military personnel are entrusted with security clearances, which entail very specific guidelines and restrictions.

And the military is very clear about interacting with the media: Service members must obtain permission before speaking to journalists. Typically, the DoD will refer the military personnel or media to Public Affairs Officers (PAOs).

I have no doubt that EA’s intentions were pure. The Medal of Honor reboot (2010) – based in part on Afghanistan’s Operation Anaconda – took great pains to honor the heroic sacrifice of our men and women in uniform. See this quote, taken from the game’s ending.

But EA forgot to bone up on OPSEC procedures.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was in the Army Reserves for three years and can attest to the fact that the military takes OPSEC (and idle chit-chat with the media) very seriously – especially after General Stanley McChrystal – formerly the Commander, International Security Assistance Force and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan – got a little too chummy with a Rolling Stone reporter, thereby forfeiting his career.

The military routinely lends technical assistance to Hollywood productions (provided the script passes DoD muster).

See: Top Gun, Transformers, Battleship, Black Hawk Down, etc.

But the DoD is especially sensitive about OPSEC concerns (the ‘ol “loose lips sink ships”), and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty – a fictionalized account of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden – caused a recent stir.

In response to the alleged disclosure of sensitive intel, Rep. Peter T. King (R-NY), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, said that “I am concerned about the possible exposure of classified information to these filmmakers, who as far as I know, do not possess security clearances.”

King has called for an investigation.

Given this turn of events – and the DoD’s ruffled feathers – it’s no surprise that the SEALs who consulted on Medal of Honor: Warfighter face disciplinary action.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Jingoistic modern-day first-person shooters love quotes from icons of American history, or at least their loading screens seem to enjoy them. So I couldn’t help but use a JFK classic to summarize Medal of Honor: Warfighter as an experience: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

Electronic Arts’ recently released multiplatform first-person shooter assumes we can’t get enough of the blockbuster bang-and-boom escapades that have made competing franchises like Activision’s Call of Duty so popular.

Yet with Warfighter, EA remains at the rear of the corporate first-person-shooter platoon because it chose to march in place instead of moving forward.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Warfighter can’t hang with its big-budget brothers in arms, so let’s enter the fray and take a closer look.

What you’ll like

The modern-warfare shooter model is tired but still fun

Warfighter clearly takes inspiration from other releases in its genre. Unlike some of the me-too efforts that have followed a similar path, the gameplay here can be pretty fun at times. Shooting mechanics are familiar and precise. Helpful onscreen icons let you know when you’ve nailed that reflex-rewarding headshot. And single-player skirmishes give you access to a convenient peeking move that facilitates leaning around corners, adding a slight cover-based-shooter vibe to the combat. Sadly, the feature is unavailable for multiplayer encounters.

Wait … is this Need for Speed?

The remarkably short single-player campaign doesn’t just leave you gripping human-neutralizing weapons. It makes you grip a steering wheel every now and then, too. These vehicle sequences are surprisingly lengthy, and they task you with driving through people-packed Pakistani streets and freshly paved Dubai motorways. You’ll even get to maneuver an indestructible Zodiac boat through a fiery-and-flooded Filipino town.

While these moments don’t have the same feel as a tightly tuned EA racing title, they break up the body-count-boosting fighting sequences pretty effectively.

United Nations of multiplayer

Obviously, Warfighter puts a lot of emphasis on multiplayer. Playing on the Xbox 360, I had to insert a whole new disc just to battle other flesh-and-blood beings. Regardless, you’ll encounter many of the standard FPS multiplayer tropes. So expect to unlock different combat classes and weapon loadouts by racking up kills in the different online modes.

What makes Warfighter stand out, however, is its global approach to the aforementioned classes. Keeping with its from-the-frontlines tone, you’re immediately asked to browse through different real-world, tier-one special-forces archetypes representing 10 countries. You can deploy as a United States Army SFOD-D assaulter, a Canadian JTF2 sniper, or even a German KSK heavy gunner, among others. While somewhat superficial, the international angle adds an interesting layer to the typical choose-your-guy-and-go approach.

Multiplayer also introduces the “fire team” concept where you’re paired with someone for a group-deathmatch session. You’ll receive bonuses as you help your fellow friendly, and you’ll even have the option to respawn at your buddy’s location (if he can stay alive long enough).

What you won’t like

Mediocrity ‘inspired by real events’

Every contemporary-combat based FPS has a gratuitous near-death, arms-flailing-in-front-of-you, holy-expletive moment or two … or 12. Warfighter joins the club, but the instances in its single-player campaign take inspiration from actual events, adding a never-before-seen level of “realism.” So this time, when a massive explosion causes a chain reaction that leads to a giant crane collapsing on top of you, it’s more “lifelike.”

Horribly rendered CG cutscenes try to weave a patronizing and sometimes confusing tale of country-first heroes sacrificing their personal lives in the name of righteousness. One of the protagonists deals with personal crises involving his need-to-know-basis mission and uncanny valley-dwelling wife and daughter. Again, mimicking the “real thing.”

The genuine men and women fighting these wars are facing life-and-death threats, both on and off the battlefield. No one can replicate or claim to replicate what they’ve gone through, are going through, and will go through. Most FPS releases hide behind a digital veil of ignorance. They’re just video games, right? Nothing but mindless fun. EA deliberately chose to stick the authenticity label on Warfighter, and that decision brings the consequences, and scrutiny, that come with it.

In short, Warfighter feels like a Michael Bay movie masquerading as a Kathryn Bigelow film.

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Update: EA spokesman Pete Nguyen returned our request for a comment on this situation:

Medal of Honor: Warfighter is an authentic depiction of combat operations in the war on terror. More than 20 combat veterans have actively contributed to the game. They offered advice on weapons, tactics, and other elements. It was not our intention to betray secrets or threaten national security in any way. We are not aware of any rules that oblige EA to vet the game with the Department of Defense, and we don’t know if veterans who consulted on the game have been in contact with the Department of Defense.

A major aspect of the Electronic Arts media campaign for the first-person shooter Medal of Honor in 2010 was that real top-level soldiers consulted on the game.

EA lauded the involvement in promotional materials: “A small group of these men acted as consultants on the development of Medal of Honor, infusing the game with their experiences and contributing ideas that make it the most authentic and relevant combat experience to date.”

Using a military expert to legitimize the authenticity of a work of fiction (be it a game, movie, or book) is not unusual.

Things are a bit different for Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and it’s because of one man: Matt Bissonnette. Under the pen-name Mark Owen, Bissonnette authored a nonfiction account of the raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. He was a member of SEAL Team 6 when it conducted the operation. Bissonnette has since retired from the U.S. Navy.

The book, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, hit stores on September 4 and drew scrutiny for potentially revealing classified information about the military tactics used to kill the world’s most-wanted terrorist. Typically, publishers submit nonfiction accounts of military duty like this to the United States Department of Defense (DOD) for approval. Bissonnette’s publishers skipped that process.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bissonnette — again under the name Mark Owen — consulted on Medal of Honor: Warfighter with two dozen other retired and active-duty SEALs and other special operatives. The Department of Defense requires that military personnel receive permission before consulting in the media.

The DoD claims that no requests for approval were ever made for the Medal of Honor: Warfighter project.

“The Department of Defense has never asked to vet the games or the contributions of veterans and active-service members,” Electronic Arts spokesman told the L.A. Times.

We’ve contacted EA about Bissonnette’s involvement in the production of the game and will update with its response.

That brings the entire situation back to Bissonnette and a Department of Defense that is afraid to allow the author off without some sort of punishment.

“I cannot as secretary send a signal to SEALs who conducted those operations, ‘Oh, you can conduct these operations and then go out and write a book about it … and/or sell your story to the New York Times,’” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in an interview on September 11 broadcast of CBS This Morning.

So while Medal of Honor: Warfighter may not include any sensitive information, and Bissonnette’s specific contributions could be negligible, that isn’t really the point.

“How the hell can we run sensitive operations here that go after enemies if people are allowed to do that?” Panetta asked rhetorically.

EA plans on releasing Medal of Honor: Warfighter on October 23. The sequel picks up where the first game left off and follows the team of “tier-1 operators” as they travel to dangerous locations around the globe.

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In the early morning hours of July 14, a pre-order promo on Origin (the Electronic Arts digital-distribution service) for the new first-person shooter from developer Danger Close apparently revealed the existence of Battlefield 4. A banner ad read: “Medal of Honor Warfighter – Pre-order today for exclusive Battlefield 4 beta access.” That bonus no longer appears anywhere on the Origin service.

Battlefield 4 has not yet been confirmed by developer DICE or publisher EA. During a speech at the University of California in November 2011, Electronic Arts president Frank Gibeau said, “There is going to be a Battlefield 4.” After that keynote, EA backpedaled, claiming that Gibeau was speaking “broadly,” and that the company had nothing to confirm.

Well, someone at Origin seems to think that Battlefield 4 is coming.

This type of pre-order promotion is in keeping with the marketing EA employed for Battlefield 3. The publisher granted early access to the Battlefield 3 beta to players who bought the Medal of Honor: Tier 1 edition.

According to the copy on this Origin offer, only customers that pre-order Medal of Honor Warfighter will get into the BF4 beta.

EA knows where it’s first-person bread is buttered.

[Update: EA announced the Battlefield 4 deal formally on July 17]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nearly 800,000 players signed up for the Battlefield 3 Premium service within the first two weeks of its launch, according to publisher EA.

In an interview with USA Today, EA Games head Patrick Soderlund said the numbers look “very promising” when compared to the company’s initial expectations. “We are very pleased with the performance so far,” he added.

For a one-time $50 fee, purchasers of Battlefield 3 Premium receive a slew of exclusive deals and content for EA’s popular military first-person shooter which has sold 17 million copies since its October 25, 2011 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

In addition to receiving all current and future expansion packs for the game (including the recently released Close Quarters), Premium owners get unique in-game decals for their weapons, entry to exclusive events, and conveniences such as stat resetting and server queue priority.

The purchaser amount roughly equals a gross of $40 million for EA.

By contrast, Activision’s rival Call of Duty Elite service, which offers a similar set of social tools and exclusive content to its members, reached 1 million paid subscribers within the first six days of its launch. As Elite’s (optional) subscription carries a $50 annual cost, that amounts to an approximate $50 million gain for Activision per year.

Premium represents the beginnings of an initiative by EA to bring similar services to its other major franchises, such as Crysis, Medal of Honor, and Need for Speed.

EA Labels president Frank Gibeau told GamesIndustry International in an interview that he believes Premium trumps Elite, saying, “We actually think Premium exceeds what Elite does — from a value standpoint, from a content standpoint, and longer term, we think we can bring more properties into that offering, and that’ll be great for business.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The game industry may never stop making overly elaborate special editions for its products, but in recent years, developers and publishers have offered alternatives to “cat helmets” and night-vision goggles by giving away full versions of older games with the purchase of newer ones.

We recently reported about Capcom’s plans to include the complete Resident Evil library (via digital download codes) with new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 copies of its upcoming survival-horror game Resident Evil 6 this fall, but Capcom is not alone. Other companies have been releasing similar package deals for a while now, including:

• Publisher Electronic Arts included a free download code for the original American Magee’s Alice with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 copies of last year’s follow-up, Alice: Madness Returns. The company also offered complimentary copies of its online shooter Battlefield 1943 with the limited edition of 2010′s Battlefield: Bad Company 2. EA promised PlayStation 3 owners who purchased last fall’s Battlefield 3, the latest installment in the series, would also receive a copy of 1943 but went back and forth on the deal before finally making good on it. The PlayStation 3 limited edition of EA’s 2010 installment in its first-person shooter series Medal of Honor included a download token for Frontline, the fourth game in the series (released in 2002).

• Japanese limited editions of developer Mercury Steam’s contribution to the Castlevania series, Lords of Shadow, contained a free download code for either the PlayStation classic Symphony of the Night (with the PlayStation 3 version) or the multiplayer-based Xbox Live Arcade game Harmony of Despair (with the Xbox 360 version). North American customers who bought Lords of Shadow at Best Buy received a download code for Symphony of the Night for both the Xbox and PS3 versions of the game.

• U.S. residents who bought publisher THQ’s post-apocalyptic action game Darksiders received a free-ish copy (by mail) of 2009′s destruction-based action game Red Faction: Guerilla. Last fall, THQ also offered PlayStation 3 owners a free download of its insane open-world action-adventure game Saints Row 2 with the purchase of Saints Row: The Third.

• The collectors’ edition of the recently released Diablo III included, among other things, a creepy replica demon skull and a USB stick containing Diablo II and its expansion pack, Lord of Destruction.

• Japanese fans of the Square Enix/Disney collaboration Kingdom Hearts can pick up the 10th Anniversary Box, which includes the new Nintendo 3DS release Dream Drop Distance along with physical copies of previous installments 358/2 Days and Re:coded for the DS.

This trend is continuing with upcoming releases, like the aforementioned Resident Evil 6. Developer Irrational Games is throwing in a free copy of BioShock with PlayStation 3 versions of BioShock Infinite when it comes out in February 2013. The God of War: Ascension Omega Edition (pictured above) will contain physical copies of every game in the series on Blu-ray. Here’s hoping more publishers and developers keep it going; gamers only have so much shelf space for tiny helmets.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tier-1 operating got a big facelift in the last two years. Medal of Honor: Warfighter follows up on the 2010 reboot with a new engine, a new (and fictional) conflict, and lots of bad people to shoot. So a few familiar elements return, too.

Franchise lead Greg Goodrich took the stage to announce “We’re goin’ global.” Instead of a single-location return to the Iraq War, Warfighter jumps around the planet. “Every single mission has a dotted line to a real-world hotspot,” according to Goodrich.

A ten-minute campaign demo took the war to Somalia, with a marine assault on an entrenched pirate hideout that went seriously wrong in record time. For starters, the air support had to retreat under rocket fire. Then a sniper bullet nails you right in the chest, kicking you back into the beach’s shallow water. Luckily, your armor took it. Unluckily, there’s plenty more where that came from. Your team moves up under the broken remains of a wharf that’s more obstacle than cover while more Somalis rip it apart.

And it all looks spectacular. Medal of Honor now runs on Frostbyte 2.0, the same engine that made Battlefield 3 so gorgeous. Particles hang in the air, debris flies through the air, and all of it happens around you with beautifully devastating precision.

Once the operators reach the broken coastal city, add black smoke to that list. An arc-menu popped up to direct a teammate to breach a door, leading to a Call-of-Duty-like slow-motion breach, followed by the always entertaining target-painting-a-building sub-mission. One high-impact detonation later, it’s time to send in the drone.

Here again, FrostByte 2.0 showed off some fun lighting effects, with Somali flashlights in the darkness providing handy direction on where to send your far superior firepower. Once back out in the open, however, the bot linked up with friendlies getting torn apart by RPG fire, and those projectiles –  fired from enemies hidden in the surrounding buildings — swiftly took the drone’s advantages away. After evening the odds a bit, one last rocket knocked it out for good.

Campaign demo done, Goodrich shifted to the game’s online mode, Global Warfighter. “No shooter is complete without a great multiplayer,” he said, and Medal of Honor’s new version (built by an in-house team at EA’s Danger Close studio, replacing DICE). Teams will take on the roles of special forces units from around the world, including Afghani Grom fighters, SEALs, British SAS, Delta Force (SFOD-D), and Russian Spetsnaz.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter releases on October 23 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Wii U.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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As the head of the EA Games label, Patrick Soderlund (pictured) oversees Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Need for Speed, Dead Space, and other hardcore gaming properties. That amounts to a huge chunk of the company’s revenues and one of its most competitive segments.

Last week, EA announced its Medal of Honor Warfighter game and new downloadable content (DLC) expansions for Battlefield 3. Both of these are big launches in EA’s ongoing battle with Activision Blizzard, publisher of Call of Duty, in the multibillion-dollar first-person-shooter market. We caught up with Soderlund shortly after the announcement at EA’s Medal of Honor and Battlefield party during the Game Developers Conference. (See our preview of Battlefield 3: Close Quarters). Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Please tell us about your background.

Patrick Soderlund: I joined EA in 2006, via the acquisition of the DICE studio. At the time I was still running DICE for EA. As time went on, I got a little bit more to do. I started by running a couple of other studios for EA and then moving to oversee all the shooter business and then the driving business. And then eventually, fast forward, today I now oversee the Games label for EA.

GamesBeat: What’s the evolution been like? It seems like the investment in shooters has been going way up.

PS: It has. For me, coming from a single studio working on multiple brands and multiple studios has been exciting. And also being a part of transforming a couple of things inside the company has been rewarding for me.

GamesBeat: That includes the reboots of these two franchises, Medal of Honor and Battlefield?

PS: Absolutely. Battlefield moving to console with the Bad Company series was a big thing for us. It was also the first time we did single-player in the Battlefield franchise. And then fast-forward to Bad Company 2, which was the first real breakout hit for the Battlefield franchise, with a substantial amount of units sold. And then obviously to the even bigger Battlefield 3 that we launched in October.

With Medal of Honor, it’s been interesting. I came in kind of late to the Medal of Honor reboot, the 2010 version. That was interesting because they had moved away from World War II. They had gone modern, and that was interesting for the team. They had to take a different approach in how they designed the product. And now, today, what you’re going to see in Medal of Honor Warfighter is the next step. It’s the most ambitious Medal of Honor product to date, I think it’s the best-looking by a country mile.

GamesBeat: So you’ve had a continuous improvement going on, the ratings for Battlefield 3 were better [though not at GamesBeat], and the sales were a lot better than Medal of Honor as well. How do you make that happen?

PS: Quality will come from many things, in many ways. A lot of people point to Battlefield 3, and they talk about the Frostbite technology. We made a conscious decision to invest in new technology. We realized that technology is going to be the enabler that gets us over the hump, so to speak, into this next generation of products.

We didn’t build tech for the sake of building tech. We looked at it and said, “We need to provide the consumer with a different kind of teamwork experience and to do so we need new technology.” We identified certain areas; we looked at things that break the illusion of reality. For us it was animation. We needed to take a giant leap in animation, and we did that.

We looked at something that a lot of people tend to forget, which is audio. We said, “We need to do a lot better at audio than we have.” We invented what we call the High Dynamic Range audio, which is what you hear in the Frostbite engine. And lastly, we also said, “We need a much higher-fidelity rendering engine and a much better destruction system.”

GamesBeat: So I guess the main competition has one big franchise. You’ve got two. That’s a good thing, right?

PS: Well, we have several. We have Medal of Honor; we have Battlefield; we have Need for Speed. We have Dead Space; we have a bunch of [intellectual properties] in our portfolio, and that’s where I think it’s our responsibility to nurture those and make them better and bigger. And also to bring out new intellectual properties for EA and for the Games label.

GamesBeat: I guess Activision made this leap a while ago — Ubisoft with Assassin’s Creed as well — a big franchise coming out every year. Is that what you have in mind, or is that somewhere you want to get to?

PS: Well, right now we’re focused on the Medal of Honor game. That’s coming this year. We shipped Battlefield last year, so that’s one way of looking at it.

GamesBeat: And I take it you’re learning a lot by doing one and applying it to the next across these franchises….

PS: What you’ll also see today is that Medal of Honor is now on the Frostbite tech. That will be visible when you see it. Again, it’s about consistently improving and consistently refining a recipe but also finding that if you take some bold risks, you can come up with some new, innovative ideas.

GamesBeat: What are the fans really asking for, and what are you trying to deliver?

PS: Well, the Games label, which is what I oversee, is actually full of fans. We are the fans. Let’s never forget that we are here to make games that we want to play. And arguably, if we make a game that we think is great and that we want to play — obviously we need to be objective — but if you do that you’re ultimately going to win over the audience. Because we are the audience. That’s one way of looking at it, and that’s the approach that we take. That’s really worked for us.

GamesBeat: Are you really shooting to raise the review scores on the games as well?

PS: Yeah. The people who know me and who work for me will tell you that I’m a hard man to work for when it comes to quality. I push my teams to the extreme to achieve quality. Again, it’s not for the sake of reaching a score. It’s because I want the best possible game in the hands of the consumer. I want them to look at it and say, “Wow, did you see that?”

GamesBeat: How do you look back on the Battlefield 3 launch?

PS: I’m extremely proud of both the team and what EA, frankly, as a company, was able to achieve. We took this thing and we really put everything we had in it, and we launched a game that was not only successful but is one of the most successful games in the history of EA. I’m extremely proud of that, and I think people out there need to understand. We see this as a start. This is where we start, and now we go forward. I think that’s the mentality I have; that’s the mentality the team has. People who have invested in the Battlefield franchise can expect a lot more from us.

GamesBeat: You had some critics, too. Is there anything you’re taking to heart from that quarter?

PS: A part of the quality process is to be very, very self-aware and realize where you have problems. Obviously, talking to others, talking to critics, reading reviews, talking to consumers, which we do all the time, is key to learning and understanding what was great and also what wasn’t so good. And then you take that to heart and change it and go forward.

People out there need to understand that the people who make these games want nothing but to please the people outside. When you have 10 million or more people buying a product, it’s going to be hard to make sure that every single one of them is happy. But the majority of people we listen to. We want to improve, and we want to make a better experience for those people.

GamesBeat: The game’s story and the server access were issues that critics raised.

PS: I wouldn’t actually say server access was that big [a deal]. We had a little bit of a hiccup at the beginning, but overall, we did really well. If you look at all the major games shipping, I know of other games shipping in our industry that had a bunch of problems. When you launch a game of that size, I don’t think it’s acceptable for us to say, OK, we’re going to just accept the problem. We’re always going to strive to have a perfect launch and get it done. But we also have to realize that things may go wrong, and I think it’s how we approach it when it does go wrong that’s the most important thing. Clear communication to the consumers about what may be wrong, that we’re fixing it, and then run as quick as you can and fix the problem.

EA PR rep: For what it’s worth, this crosses from Patrick’s portfolio into Star Wars: The Old Republic. A lot of the lessons that Patrick learned at the Battlefield launch contributed to a successful launch for Star Wars a month later. The point there is that we learned a lot on Battlefield, and you saw that learning come into play on Star Wars.

And that launch fundamentally changed our business. That launch was great for all of us. Having live teams and transitioning our studios to live teams and having an integrated team supporting the launch in that way forever changed things for us.

PS: It’s a mental switch. It’s something that you have to do as a company, where we went from, “Let’s get this thing out, and maybe we’ll patch it” to “OK, we were pregnant, the baby’s out now, and we have to take care of it every single minute.” [Editor's note: EA recently patched Battlefield 3.]

GamesBeat: So Battlefield is effectively, say, moving into a service mode first? And then maybe Medal of Honor will…?

PS: We look at it as a 24/7 service. We have people in Stockholm and North America and other parts of the world that are on this every single hour of every single day. 365 days a year. We have an operations team at DICE to look at telemetry data. How are people playing the game, how can we improve the experience? Are they having problems? Are servers down? Are they up? All that stuff.

GamesBeat: Do you think you’ll eventually get to a subscription type of model? And do you also think you’re going to take down Call of Duty?

PS: I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking at that. Like all other companies, we’re looking at how we can maximize our investment in this and get the most out of our investment and get more people playing this product. That may take us to different places, but we’re not really talking about where that is yet.

When it comes to taking Call of Duty down, you know what? I don’t look at it like that. We are in this business because we want to make the best possible products. Call of Duty is a shooter, but it’s a different shooter. And I think they have a market; we have a market. I’m fine with what I’m doing. I’m going to continue innovating and doing as best as I can with my teams. Hopefully that’s going to lead us to more units [sold] and more happy consumers.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The title is the sequel to the 2010 reboot of the franchise, dubbed Medal of Honor. Along with the Battlefield series, the Medal of Honor games are feeding the voracious appetite that fans have for modern combat first-person shooter games, which have become a multibillion dollar-market led by Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty series.

Patrick Soderlund (pictured), head of the EA Games label and longtime leader at EA’s DICE studio in Sweden, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the new game isn’t aimed solely at topping Call of Duty from its perch.

“I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “We are in the market to make the best possible game.”

EA’s combat games lagged in the past, but they have shown steady improvement since Battlefield Bad Company 2. Battlefield 3, which launched last fall, was an improvement on the previous year’s Medal of Honor (though there were a lot of flaws pointed out by critics) and it was a commercial success with 12 million units sold, more than any other previous EA modern combat game. Still, EA, had some troubles with server issues for Battlefield 3 and critics favored Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which is believed to have outsold Battlefield 3 by millions of units.

With Medal of Honor Warfighter, EA is going to get serious again and apply the learnings from the past, Soderlund said. EA took, for instance, what it learned from the Battlefield multiplayer launch and applied that to the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, he said.

Karl Magnus Troedsson, general manager of DICE, said on stage at the EA event at the Game Developers Conference that Battlefield games were “general war,” or the hammer, while Medal of Honor was more like “the scalpel.” Medal of Honor games involve real-world scenarios like hostage rescues in the Phillippines or the Somalia coast.

Greg Goodrich, executive producer of the Warfighter game, said that former professional soldiers are helping to craft the latest game about “Tier One” operatives who, in the last game, fought Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Tier One soldiers are the best of the best in the American military.

This time, the battle will take place across the globe. It will involve “Tier One” elite soldiers from 12 organizations in 10 countries, including the British SAS, the German KFK and the Polish elite soldiers.

“We’re doing this because believe it or not, kids in Poland don’t grow up dreaming they will become U.S. Navy Seals,” Goodrich said.

The goal is to make it as realistic as “the headlines on CNN.” It is also about making the game authentic in terms of replicating the gear, the weapons, and the behavior of soldiers in intense combat. Goodrich said that two dozen members of the U.S. Special Forces are helping to design the game, and two of those members came out on stage to offer their endorsement of the game’s authenticity.

“They were ghosts, the silent warriors who defend freedom around the globe,” Goodrich said as he welcomed soldiers named Kevin and Tyler on the stage.

Kevin said the game would “tell a story” about their fellow warfighters and the battles they went through around the world.

EA showed off a hostage-rescue mission in Isabela City in the Philippines. In the scenario, a team of Tier One soldiers crept up to a big building in a rain-soaked area. They blew open a door and immediately came under withering fire from several directions. The player takes aim at the threats one by one and takes them out, firing through smoke, flying building fragments, and explosions. The team, working with Filipino special forces, clears the building room by room, outflanking when they can.

They toss flash bang grenades and burst into rooms in slow motion, taking out the terrorists before they can kill the hostages. They escort the hostages out into speed boats waiting in the rain. The boats speed off and terrorists in buildings alongside the river bank try to intercept them. The player fires a heavy-caliber machine gun, tearing up the buildings and the terrorists at the same time. When you finally escape, you sigh with relief.

Goodrich said that the Medal of Honor Warfighter game will use the Frostbite 2 engine, which delivers cool 3D graphics, high-end audio, and destructible environments.

“It is the biggest and most ambitious Medal of Honor game in the history of our franchise,” Goodrich said. “Without this engine and the unprecedented support of the special forces community, this game could not be made.”

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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At stake in this competition is control of one of the biggest markets and the most rabid fans of video games. The leading combat games represent the state-of-the-art in video game technology, and the top game can generate more than $1 billion a year in revenues with each major release. Each company can be expected to spend more than $100 million on marketing and ads in this battle.

John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, said at the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York on Wednesday that EA’s realistic modern combat game will launch in November in head-to-head competition with Activision Blizzard‘s next Call of Duty title. The whole “less filling, tastes great” debate among gamers and game publishers would be just plain comical if it weren’t for the fact that so much is at stake. Riccitiello compared the feud to the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry in baseball.

“This November, we’re launching Battlefield 3,” Riccitiello said. “It’s going up against the next Call of Duty, which is presently the No. 1 game in the game industry,” he said. “A game that last year did $400 million dollars in revenue on day one. [Battlefield 3] is designed to take that game down.”

EA has been busy touting the graphics and gritty realism of Battlefield 3 in video trailers released since the Game Developers Conference in March. Call of Duty has the advantage because Activision Blizzard has been releasing games every year that are growing in demand.

Riccitiello knows how to make people care about the battle as if it were a heavyweight boxing prize fight. But there’s some risk in his smack talk, particularly if EA doesn’t blow Activision Blizzard out of the water. Last year, EA touted the return of Medal of Honor, which sold millions of units after its launch in September. But the game received poor average reviews of 72 out of 100 on the PC (74 and 75 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). Call of Duty Black Ops completely blew Medal of Honor sales out of the water and its ratings ranged from 81 to 88. Activision Blizzard has said its sales for Call of Duty games have crossed $1 billion for the second year in a row. EA’s stock price took a dip after the Medal of Honor game received negative reviews.

But Battlefield 3 clearly looks better than Medal of Honor and is being built by EA’s premiere DICE studio in Sweden. It has been in the works for a long time and EA has been pouring resources into making sure that the game is polished. Based on what I’ve seen, EA’s graphics and game play are the best yet from the Battlefield series. EA’s advantage is that it can attack Activision Blizzard from two fronts: Medal of Honor and Battlefield, alternating each installment from one year to the next.

Activision Blizzard executives have puffed out their chests as well. They said in February that their company has allocated more resources to Call of Duty games than ever before. The company has also talked about Project Beachhead, aimed at delivering a “best in class online community and service suite” for Call of Duty. It is creating a free-to-play version of the game for the Chinese market. But it hasn’t shown its hand for the next Call of Duty game yet.

All of that is friendly competition. But against this backdrop is a legal battle that has engulfed the players as well. Activision Blizzard fired the founders of its wholly-owned Infinity Ward game studio — the developer of Call of Duty games — for allegedly plotting to create a new studio financed by EA. EA has been dragged into the multiple lawsuits spawned by that dispute. The founders of Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella, have started a new game studio, Respawn Entertainment, in partnership with EA. If they emerge from the litigation unscathed, then EA could have yet another team on hand to attack Call of Duty.

Overall, EA is the underdog, with a market value of $6.7 billion, while Activision Blizzard is worth $13.4 billion. But we’ll see how that changes when the games launch in November.

This fall, EA will launch Battlefield 3, its latest entry in the great feud between EA and Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty series. As you can see from the images, the graphics are startlingly realistic. This means that EA has been busy, investing millions upon millions of dollars in better computer graphics and larger development staffs in an attempt to knock Call of Duty, the best-selling game of the holidays for the past couple of years running, off its throne.

EA released new images and video tonight, and it showed the game off to the press at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. When you look at the video below, you’ll have to agree that combat games are pushing the absolute edge in realistic graphics technology, whether you hate violent games or not. Good or bad, this is the state of the art.

You can tell that this competitive battle is a huge one just by looking at the frequency with which each company is now launching major games. Activision Blizzard is now launching a major Call of Duty game every November and it follows that up with a couple of multiplayer map pack launches in the subsequent months. EA launched its Medal of Honor game in October 2010, and it launched its Battlefield Bad Company 2 game in March, 2010. EA executives have been saying recently, when asked how the battle with Activision is going, “just wait until you see Battlefield 3.”

That’s a punishing release schedule. This means that each company has multiple teams working on the titles, which take tens of millions of dollars to make and a team of maybe 100 people working for two years. With the multiple teams at work, each company can now release a major title every year or even more often than that.

The game is being made by EA’s Digital Illusions CE (DICE) studio in Sweden. That studio has toiled on the Battlefield series since it began. With Battlefield 3, DICE has upped its game considerably, shifting from games that really did used to look like video games, with all of their clear flaws that reduced the feeling of realism. But the scenes that EA is showing off now look more like a movie or a combat video.

The new Battlefield game is set in Iraq, near the Iranian border, in the year 2014. As you can see from the trailer, U.S. Marines are engaged in pacification efforts in the middle of a city. The graphics are pretty darn stunning and are among the most realistic I’ve seen. You can look closely at the see-through smoke, the facial hair on the soldiers, the dancing flames, the sunlight coming through the windows, the shadows, the haze in the city. EA will slowly reveal trailer after trailer to tease gamers and get some froth going among the rabid fans.

Normally, video game companies make a scene look more sexy with pre-canned animations that are more like computer-generated films than actual game play. But as you can see when the action starts in this firefight, the live game play is almost indistinguishable from the look of the scripted sequence. That’s the mark of a very realistic video game experience.

The next installment of the Battlefield 3 video trailers will debut on March 16. Battlefield 3 will debut this fall and it’s very likely going to go head to head against a Call of Duty game. Check out the video below.

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State legislators in the border town, which is in the state of Chihuahua, have asked the Mexican government to ban the video game, saying it could trivialize the all-too-real drug violence in the region. But by drawing attention to the game, these opponents may find they’re adding fuel to the fire. Stirring up attention around a violent video game can frequently lead to increasing its sales.

“It is true there is a serious crime situation, which we are not trying to hide,” Ricardo Boone Salmon, a congressman for Chihuahua state, told MSNBC. “But we also should not expose children to this kind of scenarios so that they are going to grow up with this kind of image and lack of values.”

The game isn’t out until this summer on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, but it’s already generating some attention, particularly because 6,000 people have died in Ciudad Juarez in the past two years due to drug violence. Is the game a good thing because it draws focus on the horrors of the drug war, or is it a bad thing because it panders to a prurient interest in violence and teaches young folks that taking a life is a trivial decision?

A little controversy is good for a game’s sales, but too much controversy can turn it into a culture war and a train wreck for the larger video game industry, particularly if it results in regulations that hurt sales.

Last year, Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor stayed in the news for weeks because the game allowed users to play the Taliban in the ongoing war in Afghanistan during multiplayer play. EA ultimately changed the name “Taliban” to “opposing force” in order to defuse the tension.

In 2009, Activision Blizzard came under fire for a scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 where players participated in a civilian massacre at a Russian airport. That scene came up again during news reports about the bombing at the Moscow airport last month. And game company Konami dropped publication of Six Days in Fallujah, which depicted combat during the violent uprising in the recent Iraq War, after a public outcry.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel isn’t yet rated, but two previous versions set in the Old West were rated mature. The game’s web site says the game will let you “embark on a bloody road trip from Los Angeles to Juarez, Mexico.”

Game publishers typically say they’ve got the right of free expression to create games that depict real-life situations. They also say there is no evidence that violent video games cause violent behavior in real life. And they say parents shouldn’t allow kids to get their hands on mature-rated games.

This reminds me of the recent speech that game researcher Jane McGonigal gave at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas. There, she said that games can have an outstanding positive effect on game players as they play games. McGonigal said research studies have shown that gamers are at their best as people when playing: they’re motivated, optimistic, resilient, collaborative, and expressive. Those feelings spread into the real world. After playing a game, a person is more likely to go up to someone in a bar and introduce himself or herself, she said.

But Peter Raad, executive director of the Guildhall video game school at Southern Methodist University, had an interesting reaction to that speech. He said that the video game industry can’t have it both ways. That is, it can’t argue that violent video games have no effect on players, and then turn around and say that video game playing has such positive effects on behavior.

I imagine this ongoing debate is one reason why the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing California’s law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Until the high court makes its ruling, games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel will keep sending us around in circles in the argument about video game violence.

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Is that good or bad? Store sales are getting harder to interpret as the industry moves away from shipping games in boxes — but they still represent seven out of 10 dollars spent on games in the U.S., even with the runaway growth of digital downloads and virtual-goods sales in social and multiplayer games.

In stores, game sales were up in the month, while hardware sales were down. And a lot of gamers were probably saving their dollars to buy high-profile products in November such as Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system and Activision Blizzard’s big title, Call of Duty Black Ops.

Total U.S. game industry sales — including PC, handheld and console games — were $1.07 billion, down 4 percent from $1.11 billion a year ago, according to market researcher NPD Group. Video game hardware sales were $280 million, down 26 percent from $381 million. Software sales (console and handheld only) were $605 million, up 6 percent from $573 million a year a go. Accessories, driven by sales of the Sony PlayStation Move motion-sensing system, were $142 million, up 18 percent from $120 million a year ago.

Unit sales for software and accessories were essentially flat compared to last October, but, as mentioned, that doesn’t take into account additional sources of revenue such as digital downloads, used game sales, rentals, social network games, and mobile apps. Those could account for as much as 30 percent of the total spent on games, according to NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

The best-selling hardware system for the month was the Nintendo DS, and the Xbox 360 was the only game system to see a unit sales improvement compared to a year earlier. But as of last month, NPD stopped providing hardware unit sales numbers in its press releases.

Microsoft disclosed that its Xbox 360 unit sales were 325,000, up 30 percent from a year ago. Frazier said she anticipates the Nintendo Wii and the DS will benefit from holiday gift-giving.

There were plenty of new game launches during October, which was a crowded month because no one wanted to compete with the Nov. 9 launch of Call of Duty Black Ops, which is the blockbuster of the season. The heavy launch schedule helped push software sales above a year ago. Still, year-to-date, the video game industry’s sales are down 8 percent versus a year ago.

The No. 1 game of the month was NBA2K11, the basketball game from Take-Two Interactive that had the luxury of being the only major basketball game on the market because Electronic Arts canceled its title.  In order, the next top-selling games were: Fallout New Vegas from Bethesda Softworks, Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts, Fable III from Microsoft, and Star Wars The Force Unleashed II from LucasArts. Halo Reach, launched in September, was the No. 6 title.

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Electronic Arts

EA’s stock price fell 4.3 percent in after-hours trading to $15.50 a share. Before that, the stock rose 2.5 percent to $16.20 a share during regular trading on Tuesday. EA reported a GAAP net loss of $201 million, or 61 cents a share, for the second fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30. That compares to a loss of $391 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago. GAAP revenue was $631 million, down from $788 million a year ago.

Non-GAAP revenues are viewed more closely since they include online revenues during the quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, EA’s net income was $32 million, or 10 cents a share, compared with a profit of $19 million, or 6 cents a share a year ago. Non-GAAP Revenues in the quarter were $884 million, down 23 percent from a year ago but above the company’s own guidance of $775 million to $825 million. On a non-GAAP basis, analysts were expecting a loss of 11 cents a share on revenue of $811.6 million.

In the past couple of years, EA has invested heavily in making better quality games under the leadership of John Riccitiello, chief executive of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company. Each earnings call is like a referendum on that big bet. Unfortunately, EA hasn’t had as big a hit rate with its new efforts as it needs, given the higher development costs associated with its drive for better quality. EA’s fortunes are worse than average for the video game industry, whose U.S. sales are down 8 percent year to date.

Operating expenses in the quarter were $520 million, down 15 percent from a year ago. EA reported strong demand for its FIFA Soccer 11 game and Sims-branded games.

For the fiscal year, EA said it expects non-GAAP third fiscal quarter earnings of 50 to 60 cents a share on revenue of $1.375 billion to $1.5 billion. Analysts had been expecting non-GAAP third fiscal quarter net income of 70 cents on revenue of $1.44 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. For the full year, EA reiterated its guidance.

EA has hopes that its Harry Potter and Tiger Woods games will be reinvigorated with the launch of the Sony Move (which debuted in mid-September) and Microsoft Kinect (which debuts on Thursday) — two motion control systems that could bring in more non-gamers and breathe life into the industry.

Overall, EA said it had six of the top 20 selling games in Western markets with hits including FIFA Soccer 11, Madden NFL 11, NCAA Football 11, NHL 11, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and FIFA 10.

EA’s digital revenues (or online and mobile games) rose 20 percent on a non-GAAP basis to $166 million, up from $138 million a year ago. EA said it has become the top publisher on Apple’s emerging iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. Top games included The Sims 3 Ambitions and Madden NFL 11 on the iPad.

EA also said its Playfish social games unit is embracing Facebook Credits as its exclusive payment option for games on the social network. That will make virtual goods transactions easier, but Facebook takes a 30 percent fee for its service. Playfish competitors including Zynga, CrowdStar and RockYou have announced similar five-year deals with Facebook on the virtual currency.

One of the positive surprises for EA this quarter was Medal of Honor, which is exceeding the company’s expectations. EA’s stock price fell 6 percent on Oct. 12 after the expensive reboot of the combat franchise got weak average review scores, including an 80 out of 100 points from me. But EA said it still sold 2 million units in the first two weeks in October.

Big upcoming releases include Dead Space 2, Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2, and Bulletstorm. But EA noted that it had canceled its NBA Elite 11 game, which was running behind schedule.

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Every year, Fox Business Network anchor Liz Claman (top, right) parachutes into Silicon Valley and does a whirlwind three days of interviews with chief executives at the biggest Silicon Valley companies. This year, she interviewed everyone from Intel’s Paul Otellini to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz (top left) for her show 3 Days in the Valley. We caught up with her to get a view of Silicon Valley, from the outside looking in. Here’s some thoughts she had on her interviews.

VB: What did you learn?

LC: Each time there is a different feel. This year it is split. The bigger companies are a bit grim about the economy situation. The teeny ones are just like startups. They are super-optimistic, super excited. They can only think about the next step up and don’t care what’s going on with the economy. We got a real cross-section of what is really going on in the country with a Silicon Valley flavor, which means great optimism.

VB: Compared to past years?

LC: It’s a little bit different. Last year, there was some uncertainty. This year, the Intel and Applied Materials of the world are uncertain. Smaller companies like Juniper Networks are hiring. So are the solar companies. I find it to be very industry-specific. It’s a different mosaic this year.

VB: Who had the big news?

LC: Paul Otellini of Intel talked about building or retrofitting factories in Arizona and Oregon (and spending up to $8 billion). That will create about 9,000 jobs here in America. That was major news. Otellini said they wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t good business. They do three quarters of their business outside of this country. You don’t see investments on this scale so often. Carol Bartz of Yahoo said she isn’t going anywhere. In response to my question about how analysts say your grace period is ending, she said, “I’m no wimp. I’m staying.”

VB: John Riccitiello (pictured with Clayman in photo on right) said Electronic Arts made more than $100 million on Medal of Honor in your interview.

LC: That was interesting. He pointed out that the popular movie The Social Network has taken weeks to and it still hasn’t gotten to $100 million and his game got there in five days. He was also excited about this push for virtual goods. There’s money to be made selling things that don’t exist and getting people to pay for them. We talked to Outspark’s Susan Choe and Zynga, and their business is built on that. John Riccitiello is one of the big guys, and his company is malleable enough to move quickly from shoot-em-up games to casual games.

VB: For EA, the $100 million number may be disappointing.

LC: There are critics of EA who weren’t jumping up and down over it. He threw out the $100 million number. It used to be 1 million units was a hit. Now it’s 5 million. FIFA Soccer is huge for them. That’s a global game. I find the EA story fascinating to watch as it develops.

VB: What was interesting behind the scenes?

LC: John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, came out and said something surprising. He told me PayPal will become bigger than eBay. PayPal is of course a division of eBay. Scott Thompson, the head of PayPal, came up and I told him that. He said he needed eBay to be bigger than PayPal. It was interesting to see the back-and-forth between those two. On our last interview with Juniper, four F16s blew over us. I think they were going to the Giants game.

VB: Are you coming back next year?

LC: Every year. I don’t think it’s a hard sell. We cover things differently. It’s nice to get in on the ground floor with the Silicon Valley companies.

VB: Are you going to get Steve Jobs?

LC: Never say never. But he has never said yes to me. Fox Business has one of the most popular free downloadable apps on the iPhone.

Electronic Arts

But sadly, the game is a failure on both the financial and artistic fronts. Now that I’ve finished the single-player campaign game, I heartily agree with reviewers who rated the game as mediocre. And on the money front, it looks like Medal of Honor is not going to put much of a dent in Activision Blizzard’s rival Call of Duty franchise, whose next game, Call of Duty Black Ops, debuts on Nov. 9. Black Ops is expected to sell four times more copies than Medal of Honor.

Given that both games are about modern combat, there was no reason the outcome had to be so lopsided. Upon rejoining EA in 2008, Riccitiello focused the company on improving its average review scores on Metacritic. This game had the budget and talent behind it to have the highest production values. With a combination of fierce game play and good cinematics, it had the potential to be in big leagues.

But the average rating for Medal of Honor on the Xbox 360 is just 75 out of 100, after ratings by 59 critics. That’s worse than Medal of Honor: Airborne, which had an average review score of 78 in 2007 — so bad that it prompted EA to do some soul-searching. I rate Medal of Honor at 80 out of 100, largely because its saving grace is multiplayer combat. I’m disappointed it isn’t a better game because I actually would love to see more competition in this segment of the market.

I subtracted a lot of points because of the game’s performance in single-player mode. In a couple of spots, the play slows down to a crawl. When there is too much action on the screen, the Xbox 360 chokes on the processing tasks. It reminds me of the bugs in the original Halo, back in 2001. Back then, that kind of problem was acceptable. By now, game programmers should really know how to deal with the Xbox 360′s limitations. There’s no excuse for that technical weakness.

You might think that EA rushed the game out to make its debut on Oct. 13 so that it could beat Black Ops to the market. But this reboot of Medal of Honor has been in the works for years. The developers had more than enough time to get it right.

On the financial front, EA will certainly be profitable and has a good shot at selling three million copies of the game by the end of the year. But Modern Warfare 2 sold more than 20 million copies, and Black Ops will likely be way up there. EA could have grabbed a lot more of the market if its game was better.

The game focuses on the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, when elite soldiers known as Tier 1 Operators took on missions behind enemy lines in the war against the Taliban.There are a lot of cool fighting environments in the game, even though it seems like a bunch of dusty villages. You have snowy mountains, dark tunnels, congested cities, and nighttime scenes to add variety. You can get into all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and helicopters.

The game is a first-person shooter, and you switch from one Tier 1 character to another. Your soldiers keep going after the Taliban, wherever they are amassing. Along the way, Afghans and other soldiers are captured, and you have to rescue them. That adds an emotional element to the story, as the Tier 1 soldiers have to deal with the nasty tricks of war when it comes to taking hostages. But it adds only the thinnest layer of emotion, as there really isn’t enough full-motion video delivered in between the combat scenes to make you grow attached to the soldiers.

There’s no villain in the game except the nameless Taliban. The closest thing to a villain is an American general in Washington, D.C. He barks orders at commanders on the battlefield, causing unnecessary casualties, friendly fire, and then is ultimately forgotten late in the game. That’s not exactly a movie-like script. The game was unfairly castigated as unpatriotic because it lets you can play the Taliban role in multiplayer matches. But it gives plenty of nods to the sacrifices of brave American soldiers in the real war. It is realistic in its depiction of modern warfare and violence, but sometimes it gets a little too boring.

In one mission, you have to sit on a cliff and fire your sniper rifle at enemies on another ridge. You fire your weapon and a second or two later see their heads split like melons through your scope. The problem is that the other Taliban who witness these scenes aren’t terribly smart and they don’t really bother to go into hiding. You have to spend an inordinate amount of time looking through your scope to find them. When you do, they are sitting ducks. That laid-back action doesn’t belong in a game like this.

You would never find that in a Call of Duty game. In one scene in the upcoming Black Ops, for instance, you are landing at a CIA building in Hue during the historic battle for that city in the Vietnam War. Explosions are going off all around you. You are about to slide down a rope to the ground when your helicopter is hit by a rocket blast. The helicopter begins spinning round and round as you hang on to the rope. You are finally dashed through a window, whereupon you are set upon by North Vietnamese soldiers by the dozens. That’s what you call an action scene.

Medal of Honor also has a lot of scenes that are simply scripted poorly. In many scenes, you clear enemy soldiers and then follow your buddy to the next door to break it down. But many times, I had to backtrack and search for my buddy to figure out where to go. That’s just poor design. You can click on an indicator to tell you where you’re supposed to go, but it should be visually obvious where the next step is. Otherwise, you just waste time wandering. As reviewer Seth Schiesel at the New York Times pointed out, there’s a point when you’re taking over the Bagram air base where you are trying to get to the next part of the battle. You wander around to a door and find it won’t open. You eventually make it up to the top where you have to use a sniper rifle. Then you go back to the original door and find that you can now open it. There’s a similar scene where you have to figure out that you have to grab your buddy’s laser range-finder in order to pinpoint targets for attack.

On the plus side, there are some cool experiences that you have not seen in other Call of Duty games. You get to fly a Cobra gunship helicopter over a village, shooting down at the enemies who fire rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and Stinger missiles at you. You can rain hell on the enemy in a quite satisfying way as they pop out of buildings and try to take up positions against you. But again, the game design lets you down. Nothing tells you that you can’t take out the last enemies in a building with your cannon. You have to fire rockets at them to demolish the building.

There are also a couple of good “last stand” battles where you are surrounded and have to fight off dozens of Taliban fighters. The shooting gets intense. The enemies gradually reduce your hiding place, a ruined home, to rubble. You run out of places to hide. But I noticed as I was looking through my weapon’s scope that many of the enemy soldiers were running down the hill at me with the exact same pattern. They were like robots, coming down to their doom to the same spots where I could easily pick them off. The Taliban are really quite predictable at sticking their heads up from behind rocks.

I tried the controversial multiplayer version as well, playing both the Taliban and American sides. I found it much easier to survive based on shooting skill in the multiplayer mode. If you were careful and didn’t run around corners with guns blazing, you could survive for a longer period of time. No single weapon was too powerful, and the action unfolded at a more appropriate pace than other extremely fast-paced games. That favors slower players like me.

It’s too bad that the multiplayer mode caught so much political criticism. Responding to critics, EA changes the name of the enemy soldiers from Taliban to Opposing Force. Nothing else was changed. But the multiplayer experience was not as fun as the crazed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer experience, where you get so many rewards that you want to keep playing on and on. Nor was it as well thought-out as the multiplayer combat in EA’s Battlefield Bad Company 2, where team strategy really pays off. In this crowded space of multiplayer shooting games, Medal of Honor scores well. But that’s not good enough to compensate for the weaker single-player experience.

EA has probably sold enough copies to justify a sequel. But it would be wrong for EA to be satisfied with strong sales of a game that has a 75 Metacritic rating. That was the way that the old Electronic Arts viewed the world. There are lots of other companies with studios that are quite capable of producing 90-rated games that sell even better, as we have seen all year long. That’s where EA should be operating on a consistent basis.

Creatively, it has to up its game to play in the big leagues with Activision Blizzard’s first-rate studios. Fortunately for EA, it has staked a couple of the founders of Call of Duty — Vince Zampella and Jason West — and their new company Respawn Entertainment. If Danger Close, the EA studio that made Medal of Honor, can’t do the job, maybe Respawn will step into the breach.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Investors are evidently punishing EA because it has focused its comeback in video games on one major metric: game quality. Review scores are a proxy for that metric. The average game ratings of critics are aggregated on the site Metacritic, which shows that Medal of Honor’s rating on the Xbox 360 is a paltry 76. On the PC, 12 reviewers rated the game at 75. On the PlayStation 3, 21 reviewers gave it an average score of 74. User reviews are pretty much in the same category. Not all reviewers, including me, have finished their reviews. But it will be pretty hard to turn those numbers upward as the rest of the reviews come in.

Shares of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company fell $1.05 a share, or 6 percent, to $16.61 a share. The stock had risen 15 percent in recent weeks, mostly on anticipation for Medal of Honor. EA had shelved the Medal of Honor franchise after the disappointing performance of Medal of Honor Airborne, which has an average Metacritic rating of 78. After three years of rethinking and bringing the franchise into the modern combat era, the reboot has pretty much the same lackluster reviews as Airborne.

I haven’t rated the game yet myself, but it didn’t seem that terrible to me. It did compare unfavorably to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, but the storyline of the single-player campaign and the multiplayer games are a lot different from the Call of Duty series, as I noted in my preview. Modern Warfare 2, which sold more than 20 million copies, has an average rating of 94.

Despite the weak reviews, EA still has a chance to sell millions of copies of the game, since there are a few weeks before Activision Blizzard’s latest installment, Call of Duty Black Ops, hits the store shelves. The EA game has been controversial because EA allowed players to play the role of Taliban fighters shooting American troops in the multiplayer version of the game. Criticism was so fierce that EA renamed the rivals “the opposing force” instead of the Taliban.

Activision Blizzard’s stock was up 1 percent on Tuesday at $11.25 a share. Logically, if Medal of Honor is really the cause of EA’s stock drop, we should see a corresponding increase in Activision Blizzard’s stock price, as gamers gravitate towards better-reviewed titles.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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John Riccitiello, chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based EA, has made it his mission to raise EA’s game quality over the past three years. Logically, profits will follow. Medal of Honor was a once-stellar franchise that stumbled, went astray and then went fallow at EA. Meanwhile, the strength of Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty games has made it into a superpower of video games. EA, once the undisputed leader, now finds itself the underdog in this battle as it tries to restore Medal of Honor to its rightful place in the first-person shooter genre.

Depicting modern combat in Afghanistan, the game is a direct assault on rival Activision Blizzard’s dominant Call of Duty combat game series. If EA can succeed in selling millions of copies of Medal of Honor, it will steal back marketshare in the shooting game genre and blunt the launch of Call of Duty Black Ops, which debuts on Nov. 9.

It didn’t help that a firestorm of criticism erupted after families of war victims objected on national TV to EA’s decision to allow players to pose as Taliban fighters in multiplayer combat. Facing withering criticism and a ban on U.S. military bases, EA changed the name of the multiplayer foes to the “opposing force,” rather than the Taliban. It also argued that, as realistic as the combat is, Medal of Honor is just a game. And in a game, you have good guys and bad guys.

The controversy hurt EA’s prospects. But it also raised awareness of the game. A similar controversy last year helped boost awareness of Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 into the stratosphere. In that game, players could participate in a terrorist massacre at a Russian airport. The criticism was so fierce that Activision Blizzard included an option to skip the controversial scene. Yet Modern Warfare 2 went on to sell more than 20 million copies, making it the best-selling video game of all time.

By cutting out the Taliban name, EA didn’t have to change the substance of its game at all. It can consider itself lucky. Konami had to cancel its Six Days in Fallujah, a game based on real events where military contractors were burned alive in a battle in Iraq, after protests erupted. I am glad to see Medal of Honor survive long enough to make it to the real battlefield: the video game marketplace. Medal of Honor is fundamentally respectful of the sacrifices that soldiers make on the battlefield and the impossible conditions that they face. The Army really ought to consider it a recruiting tool, not a game to be reviled.

I’ve had a chance to play the first few levels of Medal of Honor and indulge in a few rounds of multiplayer combat. Yes, I played a Taliban fighter and managed to shoot an American soldier who was coming at me in a multiplayer match. I found no particular thrill in that act. Nor do I feel that it was despicable of EA to include that option in the video game. To me, it is a game. It is realistic, but it is not gratuitous. The Taliban are an integral part of the multiplayer combat. If you didn’t include them, you would have no game. If you don’t want to play them, you can back out of a multiplayer match until you get to play an American soldier.

Other games have skirted this issue of letting you play terrorists. America’s Army let you shoot enemy soldiers. But you always played an American soldier shooting at terrorists. No matter which side you were on in a multiplayer game, you always saw the enemy as terrorists. EA chose not to take that path, and now the company is dealing with the consequences of that decision.

EA at least has a track record of making games that are respectful, not exploitative, of the soldier’s experience. The first Medal of Honor game was developed by DreamWorks Interactive and published by EA in 1999 on the PlayStation. The best game was Medal of Honor Allied Assault, which depicted the horrific landing of soldiers at Omaha Beach on D-Day during World War II. The scene in the video game was as unforgettable as the D-Day landing in the film Saving Private Ryan. But as EA pumped out sequel after sequel, the quality of the games suffered and the Call of Duty franchise surpassed it with better graphics, combat, and gritty realism.

EA stopped making the Medal of Honor games in 2007 and then rebooted the game under Riccitiello’s leadership. The new Medal of Honor game was built by EA’s Danger Close studio in Los Angeles and the multiplayer part was created by EA’s DICE studio, the maker of the Battlefield Bad Company 2 game earlier this year, in Sweden. EA’s timing was good in one sense. Activision Blizzard saw its Call of Duty studio, Infinity Ward, implode in a bunch of departures and lawsuits as Activision chief Bobby Kotick accused the Infinity Ward founders of planning to defect to EA. Dozens of developers have left Activision to join Respawn Entertainment, a new studio created by the Call of Duty creators that is likely making a game for EA. Those departures were not enough to derail Call of Duty. Activision’s second Call of Duty studio, Treyarch, is launching Black Ops this year.

In this game, you play a handful of handpicked warriors known as Tier 1 Operators. They’re among the hundreds of soldiers who exist within the Army’s Special Operations Command. You have to operate in small squads behind enemy lines in the rugged environment of Afghanistan. In the game, you can duel with snipers, race through dirt roads and dry riverbeds in an all-terrain vehicle (ATV), call in air strikes from a distance, and wipe out enemy camps from the cockpit of an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. In many of the missions, you don’t just charge in guns blazing. You have to operate in stealth, making sure you take out the enemies with knives or silent weapons. When you break down doors to rescue hostages, you have to wonder whether you’re just being set up for a booby trap.

The environments of the game look realistic. The market of Kandahar is filled with mud-brick buildings that spout dust and debris when you riddle them with bullets. It is very difficult to stay alive in a battle, and that should give everybody who plays it an appreciation for how dangerous a battlefield can be.

So far, Medal of Honor doesn’t stack up against the Call of Duty games, either Modern Warfare 2 or its upcoming Black Ops title. The graphics aren’t as polished. The game play is somewhat slower. The environments aren’t as pretty. The cinematic sequences — or film-like sections that advance the story in between game levels — are solid but not as riveting as the over-the-top drama of the Call of Duty games.

But even with all of those complaints, Medal of Honor is still a great game to play that is well worth the $60 price. It stands in the shadow of Call of Duty, but it towers above many other video games coming this season.

The multiplayer fights are fierce. As you start out, you can expect to be slain many times more than you kill. It pays to hide out in the corners or the smoke, just because the battlefield is so lethal. But I think that the game is worth finishing and the multiplayer combat could be entertaining for a long time, at least until Black Ops comes along.

It’s just too bad for EA that a rival game is coming up so soon. Medal of Honor will likely be overshadowed by Black Ops, which I previewed earlier this year. I’m waiting to play more of Medal of Honor before I give a complete review. But it’s clear to me that first-person shooter fans will enjoy this game, if only because it is far better than most video games being released now. It delivers a solid combat experience and will likely whet the appetites of hardcore game fans as they await the launch of Black Ops.

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The game is set in Afghanistan, and the single-player story allows the player to fight as elite American soldiers only. But in the multiplayer version, you could play either as Americans or Taliban. That upset soldiers and the families of victims of the Afghan war.

It looked like EA was going to weather the protests — which had been going on for weeks –  with its stance that every game has a good guy and a bad guy and that somebody had to play the bad guy. But it was harder to swallow that argument because the game designers prided themselves on the extreme realism in a game simulation that was set in an ongoing war where American soldiers are still being killed by Taliban fighters. Mourning family members led a crusade against the game.

It isn’t clear if this change — where EA refers to the Taliban in multiplayer as “the opposing force” — will satisfy the critics. EA isn’t changing the multiplayer game itself; it is just renaming the bad guys. EA’s Medal of Honor game is an extremely important title for the company; analysts expect it could sell around 3 million units and represent a credible threat to Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty franchise. Medal of Honor is crucial to EA’s ongoing recovery in video games.

The publicity around the Taliban issue could be both good and bad for EA. Some notoriety helps a game. Last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was heavily criticized because it allowed players to participate in a civilian massacre at an airport in Russia. But the game company went on to make only a cosmetic change to the game (allowing players to opt out of that scene) and the game went on to become the best-selling game of all time.

EA, however, has run into more determined opposition from military families. The commanding general of the Army and Air Force Exchange Services said he decided to have Medal of Honor pulled from U.S. military base retail stores worldwide. The change here is a small one, as the only thing that is different is that the multiplayer screen will have an “OpFor” name standing for “opposing force” instead of “Taliban.”

This morning, EA’s Greg Goodrich, executive producer of Medal of Honor, said the decision to drop the Taliban name was driven purely by concern expressed by the friends and families of fallen soldiers. Here is his full statement:

In the past few months, we have received feedback from all over the world regarding the multiplayer portion of Medal of Honor. We’ve received notes from gamers, active military, and friends and family of servicemen and women currently deployed overseas. The majority of this feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. For this, the Medal of Honor team is deeply appreciative.

However, we have also received feedback from friends and families of fallen soldiers who have expressed concern over the inclusion of the Taliban in the multiplayer portion of our game. This is a very important voice to the Medal of Honor team. This is a voice that has earned the right to be listened to. It is a voice that we care deeply about. Because of this, and because the heartbeat of Medal of Honor has always resided in the reverence for American and Allied soldiers, we have decided to rename the opposing team in Medal of Honor multiplayer from Taliban to Opposing Force.

While this change should not directly affect gamers, as it does not fundamentally alter the gameplay, we are making this change for the men and women serving in the military and for the families of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice – this franchise will never willfully disrespect, intentionally or otherwise, your memory and service.

To all who serve – we appreciate you, we thank you, and we do not take you for granted. And to the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines currently serving overseas, stay safe and come home soon.

Greg Goodrich
Executive Producer
Medal of Honor

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The option to play as the Taliban has drawn criticism from various news groups and specifically the mother of a soldier recently killed during the war. First lieutenant Ken Ballard was killed as the result of an accidental discharge of a mounted M240B from an M1 Abrams MBT. His death was initially reported as Killed In Action, but that was later changed when Army Criminal Investigation Division ruled the death an accident. EA has said that in all games, there are good guys and there are bad guys. In the past, game companies have pulled games that have caused furors. Konami, for instance, canceled a game called Six Days in Fallujah after a public outcry. See Industry Gamers for more.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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