"They live in a cave": Dragon Age veteran reveals EA's attitude towards RPG fans and the reasons for Anthem's failure

According to a Dragon Age veteran, EA had its own, somewhat derogatory name for true role-playing game fans - they were said to have "lived in a cave" and could be ignored.

Here's What We Know

Speaking to GamesRadar+, BioWare veteran David Gader explained that before leaving BioWare, his tastes had become somewhat "old-fashioned" in the eyes of EA. "I was very vocal on the Dragon Age team," he said. "I was always trying to push our traditional mechanics. And that was not very welcomed by EA."

He claims that EA considered the mechanics that shaped games like Dragon Age: Origins were "slow and cumbersome" rather than the "dynamic and sophisticated" presentation that the studio was being pushed towards. This meant that Gader's views were "often not very welcome", despite his long tenure at the studio and his involvement in many of its most famous RPGs.

Part of the reason for this, he says, is that EA didn't see the traditional RPG audience as one worth focusing on. He claims that executives referred to these players as being "in a cave". The cave, he explains, "was where the nerds went. The nerds were in the cave. You made an RPG, and the nerds in the cave always came to the RPG because it was an RPG."

This dedication to the genre, according to EA, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about nerds. "You didn't have to try to attract them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we really wanted, which was much bigger."

For the publisher, the end point of this philosophy was Anthem, a live-service project that completely failed at the start and was completely abandoned within two years.

This proves once again that the leaders of large gaming companies do not always understand the real situation in the industry.

Source: GamesRadar