When EA released Dungeon Keeper for mobile, well safe to say the experience wasn’t really what gamers remembered of the game back in the day. The concept was the same, but the fact that it was a free-to-play title that constantly seemed to bombard the gamer with in-app purchases most likely turned many away from it, and also irked those who were already playing it.
This is something that EA’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, admitted during an interview with the folks over at Eurogamer. When asked if he thought that Dungeon Keeper for mobile was a misstep for the company, he admitted that it was, going as far as calling it a shame that things turned out the way it did. “For new players, it was kind of a cool game. For people who’d grown up playing Dungeon Keeper there was a disconnect there. In that aspect we didn’t walk that line as well as we could have. And that’s a shame.”
He also stated that EA might have misjudged the economy, in response to gamers who felt that they weren’t really getting any value for their money via the in-app purchases that sometimes felt more like a necessity, rather than an option, to help them proceed in the game’s later stages. Wilson later adds, “You have to be very careful when you reinvent IP for a new audience that has a very particular place in the hearts and minds and memories of an existing audience.”
Dungeon Keeper for mobile has been lambasted by reviewers and gamers, and only managed to score 42 on Metacritic. In fact, the game’s original creator, Peter Molyneux, did not seem particularly pleased about the mobile remake either, claiming that EA didn’t get it quite right.
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