EA Talks Franchise Branding

Morris took over to explain a change in EA's approach to brands in recent years. He said the publisher basically spent two decades creating original intellectual properties but never gave a second thought to extending those brands beyond the world of games. While there was a comic book here or a tie-in there, Morris said there was no coordinated effort and no opportunity for the company to learn from its past mistakes.

At least Dead Space's character design leaves casting decisions wide open. To remedy that, EA centralized its brand-extension efforts. One small team now works with all of the developers to coordinate their project's leaps beyond the gaming screen. The publisher's slogan, as articulated by John Riccitiello, is IP Cubed: Create, Sequel, Extend. Morris is focused on the "extend" part of that equation and started going over the publisher's attempts to break onto the big screen.

To get into movies, EA allied itself with people that knew how to make movies better than EA did. The publisher has an exclusive deal with United Talent Agency to set up motion picture deals for a variety of its key properties. Morris said the good news is that with UTA and the original IP EA owns, the publisher has been able to land a few deals, specifically Dante's Inferno, Dead Space, Spore, and Army of Two. Morris said EA is hands-on with all of those projects because the worst thing for the company would be for these films to get made--but get made poorly.