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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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