Battlefield won't go annual

DICE Sweden front-man Ben Cousins says he expects the Battlefield team to avoid FIFA- or Tiger Woods-style annual updates despite owner EA's traditional success with that model.

"DICE has always been at the forefront of online and I think that we're going to skip the notion of updates and go into services. I think that's the obvious way forward for us, to have continued revenue streams coming from different ways of looking at things," Cousins told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published this week.

He believes Battlefield is "special". "I like to think it's thought of as special within EA. When you're one of the market leaders on PC - and there are very few games that sell as well as Battlefield on PC - you need to ensure that you produce quality, and hopefully that will mean that we get more time to develop new titles," he explained.

Cousins also believes that EA will only ever escape the cynical view of it as the McDonald's or Coca-Cola of gaming through products. "I don't think you can have a PR campaign or some fancy marketing that will change people's opinions of your brand," he said.

For more from Cousins, including some of his reflections on PlayStation Home - upon which he worked during a stint at Sony - read the first part of the Ben Cousins interview on GamesIndustry.biz.