L’éditeur, qui n’a pas eu une réputation très positive ces derniers temps, a précédemment écarté les chances que le petit sorcier fasse quelque chose d’unique.
Kim Salzer a travaillé chez Electronic Arts. En consultant son LinkedIn, vous verrez qu’elle a été directrice du marketing produit chez Electronic Arts de 2000 à 2003 (puis vice-présidente de la gestion internationale des marques chez Activision de 2004 à 2009). Elle avait donc un bon aperçu des expériences passées de l’éditeur. Elle a révélé l’une d’entre elles lors d’une interview sur Twitch.
La société fondée par Trip Hawkins prévoyait un MMO basé sur la franchise Harry Potter. Écoutons ce que Salzer avait à dire : “Nous avons fait toutes les recherches. Nous avons construit la bêta. Il s’agissait d’une expérience à la fois hors ligne et en ligne où nous envoyions des objets aux enfants, comme des prix et des rubans, etc. [It was] thoroughly researched, very confident in its success.
But it was killed, for lack of a better term, because Electronic Arts was going through some changes at that time, and they just didn’t know or believe enough that the IP would have a shelf-life longer than a year or two,” Salzer said. At the time, Harry Potter was mainly aimed at children: the darker tone episodes were far from the cinemas and the bookshelves. (Part 7, which got two cinematic and video game adaptations, the latter of which were shoddy and published by EA, fits the bill.) In other words: the publisher didn’t believe in the long-term success of its games (even though the Need For Speed titles of the early 2000s still hold up today…).
But it’s worth pointing out that we mentioned an MMO. If you go with 2003, even that could have beaten Blizzard’s attempt that is still running today (without commentary: World of Warcraft), so Electronic Arts missed a massive opportunity, as the game model would have allowed for content updates based on later movies so that it could have been up and running by 2011 when the second movie part of the seventh book was released…
Source: PCGamer
