Young points out that the company tries to inject its yearly franchises with "1-3 meaningful innovative features" but that a company the size of EA can still afford to "rest some franchises in a given year." Since EA is not in the habit of actually skipping years in its yearly series, he is presumably referring to the inclusion of new innovative features rather than the actual publishing of the games when it comes to "resting." In a large publically-traded company, Young points out, shareholder expectation plays a large role. "Conservative decisions are not a bad thing," he said. "What's important to shareholders is not the degree of conservatism but the degree of return. What's important is that you're growing the business year-on-year."

EA Partners is a program with the goal of attracting independent developers and bringing innovative games to market. However, the article notes that the program ends up simply attempting to make such studios conform to the EA development model rather than necessarily fostering their creative endeavors. Scandizzo comments on some of the experiences he had when Castaway was still working with EA:

"EA used to have an idea where they wanted you to have a 14-word motto for your game that would sum up in the public eye what your game was. In fact, it became a big problem that we couldn't sum ours up quickly enough as a 14-word motto. I think the problem which some innovation has run into is it's really difficult to sum it up in 14 words. ... The way in which I'd learned to work a project back at Blizzard was to actually focus on the gameplay early on, and then a lot of the polish could come later. And EA works very differently. EA looks for promotional materials very early on that advocate what the game is going to eventually look like so they can get marketing behind the game early on. [That] was something we didn't have to worry about at Blizzard."

Castaway vice president Stefan Scandizzo, Michael's brother, believes that the attitude towards innovation taken by large publishers results in a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in the commonly held viewpoint that "innovation doesn't sell." He explains that since publishers are so shy about new innovative games in the first place, they don't give them the attention, budget, and marketing they require, which then makes it far less likely the games will succeed when put up against the heavily marketed "sure thing" titles, leading to a reinforced belief that "innovation doesn't sell" on the part of other publishers. He feels that eventually the market is going to grow tired of sequels and rehashes and will eventually start demanding more unique games. Ultima creator Richard Garriott also worked for EA for a time after Origin was acquired by the company, but left when he was encouraged to shift his focus away from large projects like Ultima Online to small Java-based web games. He too believes that innovative games are necessarily in the industry, but predicts that the smaller studios will not be able to survive in today's gaming environment and that it will be up to long-standing established talent like himself to bring it to market.