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EA doesn’t have the best reputation. Whether it’s being awarded with the title “worst company in America” multiple times, its role in the downfall of previously beloved developers like BioWare, its love of microtransactions, or continually heralding the demise of singleplayer games, it hasn’t earned much goodwill.
Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares, whose team just released Split Fiction, one of the best co-op games ever made, doesn’t share that sentiment.
“Nobody believes me,” he says over Zoom. And the reaction is understandable. Fares is a passionate, straight-talking, outspoken developer who is often critical of the industry. But Hazelight has also been working with EA for years, as its games are published under the EA Originals label.
“For some reason, people like to hate EA, I don’t know why,” he says. “My relationship with them is very good. They’re super supportive of us. So I have nothing bad to say about them.”
As Fares sees it, the problems with the industry don’t stem from any one publisher, but the capitalist philosophy of constant growth.
“The problem with the whole capitalist idea is that you need to make more and more and more and more money,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense, because at the end of the day, you will make stupid decisions. But I just hope, in the best of worlds, that you take less of these stupid decisions and focus on what you truly, truly want. And those are the games.
The problem with the whole capitalist idea is that you need to make more and more and more and more money.
Josef Fares, Hazelight founder
“Because when you have a great game—we’re seeing it with [Split Fiction], a game done only from passion, a game where you literally don’t have to buy two copies, a game that doesn’t have any microtransactions. And you see the success it does. I mean, it’s even a financial success, obviously, because people want to pay for something that feels great. So I just hope it inspires other publishers to do that.”
EA, for instance, backed Fares’ plan to effectively give the game away for free to prospective co-op buddies. The Friend’s Pass, which was included in It Takes Two and taken further in Split Fiction, allows you to share the game with your friend, letting them play with you for free. It’s cross-platform, too.
The issues the industry is facing aren’t as simple as they appear to be to those looking in from the outside, Fares reckons. “I know a lot of developers, and I know a lot going on behind the scenes that I think would be beneficial for people to know.” He believes that more transparency would help people understand better what is actually going on.
He’s taken a particular approach with Hazelight, keeping it small with a flat structure, that he believes has contributed to its successes like Split Fiction.
“I say all the time, ‘Fuck shit up without fucking up’, and these are not just things I say to be funny. What I’m trying to say is that there’s no limitation to creativity here. Everything is OK at the studio, and it’s only me and the team, which means if there’s an idea up there, we just talk about it and it’s in. You don’t have these layers of like, you gotta go through this, do that, there’s nothing like that.”
Crucially, he says that EA doesn’t interfere, allowing Hazelight to experiment and create the type of game that, like Split Fiction, introduces new mechanics and concepts with every single chapter: “The creative process is very fluid.”
“Every publisher fucks up now and then,” he says. And it could be argued that with a company of EA’s size, and with the number of studios it owns and works with, those mistakes are going to be more numerous and higher profile. Equally, though, one could argue that EA firmly believes in the stuff we see as mistakes, like its hostility towards singleplayer games.
There is, however, a tendency to focus only on the bad. In this instance, with Split Fiction, clearly EA made the correct calls, not meddling in Hazelight’s plans, and taking a risk on the Friend’s Pass. It does sometimes get it right.
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Kurt Indovina
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