I believe physics is still mostly Havok, so it's not them. They are just that... amazing at using it.
The annoying part about the "creation engine" is that it's still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it. With its shitty proprietary netimmerse format that basically only exist for them at that point.
With time, people have developed tools to create content for it, but it's yet another area where they went, fuck it, people are going to make our games better, and we don't even need to do anything to make their life easier while they do.
The plan was one company making TWELVE live services in one year.
Hey, Sony execs, quick game : make me a list of 12 currently running, succesful live service games, from any company. Oh, and don't count mobile shit, you're a console seller, that's not the experience you're providing even if you wanted too.
Bonus round : estimate the rough cumulated gaming time of all of your user base and divide it by 12. Now estimate the level of engagement these freaking games require. And take into account that there may also be other games around, and some people may want to play them too, amazingly.
Oops.