Sorry – I couldn’t make it through that with a straight face.

1 – As you suggested, 8lb Gorilla becoming EA’s rapid prototyping lab. To be honest, I think ALL major AAA developers need a team like this, to keep fresh ideas coming through. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Experimental Gameplay turned out to be good for – you try a whole bunch of stuff, without fear that most of it will fail, and when something works, you pass it off to a team to make a full game out of it, confident in the knowledge that there’s already some public interest in the idea.

2 – From what I understand, there are several platforms (iPhone, mobile gaming in general, casual web games, digitally-distributed “indie” games (whatever that means in the context of an EA studio)) where the profit margins aren’t great, and as such you need a mechanic for keeping the production costs down. By keeping teams small and product cycles short, you can do that. It’s the big companies learning from the business models of the little indie companies.

What I’ll be interested in, if this gets off the ground, is whether teams working in an indie-style, when funded and marketed by big companies like EA, can compete with actual indie companies on their own terms. It’s possible that the indie dev model, combined with EA’s marketing clout, could really put the squeeze on the ability of indie games to get noticed or make money. If that happened, how many indie game developers would quit being indie in order to apply for jobs at 8lb Gorilla? Far from EA losing employees to go start indie companies, they might find indie companies queuing up to sign with them…