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Black: EA treats dev team members as "building blocks they can mix and match"

buildingblocks

EA doesn't respect individual members on its development teams, Bodycount boss Stuart Black's told the Guardian. Unfortunately, this quote doesn't contain the word "f**k".

"I don't think there's a lot of respect for individuals on teams," Black said of EA's developers, speaking in "broad terms".

"The team members are building blocks that they can just mix and match."

Black added that multiple team approaches, such as those applied to Call of Duty, didn't allow for best practice.

"Most development studios have multiple teams," he said. "Not all: Media Molecule is one tight, very focused team. But quite a few do, so just because it says developer X on the cover, doesn't give you a guarantee of quality either – it's the individual team making that game.

"So you have developers like Blizzard, who have consistency, Valve… they have consistency in their staffing and you can see that in their software. They build on their ideas and themes and the games they develop get richer. But those teams that chop and change on membership, they flounder."

Black is currently developing shooter Bodycount at Codemasters Guildford. It's due out for 360 and PS3 early next year.

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Patrick Garratt

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Patrick Garratt is a games media legend - and not just by reputation. He was named as such in the UK's 'Games Media Awards', the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. After garnering experience on countless gaming magazines, he joined Eurogamer and later split from that brand to create VG247, putting the site on the map with fast, 24-hour a day coverage, and assembling the site's earliest editorial teams. He retired from VG247, and the games industry, in 2017.

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