Fans were so unhappy with Command & Conquer Rivals that EA remastered the original then released its source code

EA’s decision to remaster PC classic Command and Conquer – and later release the game’s source code – has a surprising origin: 2018 mobile game Command and Conquer Rivals.

At The Game Business Live on Monday, EA Entertainment boss Laura Miele talked through meeting fan expectations, and how Command and Conquer Rivals was an example of when the publishing giant missed the mark.

“I love when a team has a spark of a passion to do something, and there was a team at EA that wanted to create this really cool competitive Command and Conquer game for mobile, Command and Conquer Rivals,” explained Miele.

“I thought, oh gosh, what a great way to bring Command and Conquer to even more people, given the reach and penetration of this platform, this is going to be really great. So, I was pretty excited about it.”

“However, our long-term core fans were not, and they thought, oh my gosh, you’re taking Command and Conquer, and you’re putting it to mobile, and you’re not remastering or taking care of something ourselves…”

And so, it was just such a valuable moment for me that we didn’t really have permission necessarily to stray too far from what that core PC experience was…so we immediately and quickly gathered together some of my friends that had left Westwood who had gathered together as a studio, and I asked them to work on a remaster for us, and so we remastered and brought it back to life in a more contemporary way.”

“Since then, we’ve released open source code for players to engage in. There was a few conversations about that at EA, and we all wanted to do that for our fans.”

Appmagic data suggests Command and Conquer Rivals has earned EA $11.9m in IAP revenue since the game launched in 2018, and has racked up nearly 7m downloads. The game now appears to be running on autopilot, and pulls in $23-25k per month in IAP revenue and attracts about 40k downloads per month.