While Electronic Arts may have franchises like Madden, FIFA, Battlefield, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Sims, Command & Conquer, and others dominating the sports, shooter, RPG, and sim genres, they are lagging behind in terms of action games.
In an interview with IGN, Patrick Soderlund, Executive Vice President of EA Studios, talked about how they will be getting into the action market:
If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don’t have a lot. EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin’s Creed or Batman or GTA or those types of games that are really big. The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn’t been done before.
Responding with a “maybe” when asked if Jade Raymond’s Motive studio is making a gigantic action game, Soderlund further explained that they aren’t going after GTA. “But what I’m saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do,” he added.
It appears these AAA titles won’t be set in familiar franchises, with Soderlund saying EA has a “large ambition to invest in new IP” and “we’re building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP.”
What we do know about Motive is that they’re working with BioWare, as well as with Visceral Games on Amy Hennig’s Star Wars project, which Nolan North suggested would be in the style of Uncharted. Discussing Jade Raymond’s decision to join EA, Soderlund said, “She wanted to build action games and we were going in that direction…. It kind of came together, and that’s why we did it.”
[Source: IGN]
