Electronic Arts Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen touched on their virtual reality plans yesterday during the UBS Global Technology Conference, re-iterating that they’ll be using a wait-and-see approach:
As one of the largest software producers we have all of the manufacturers of equipment coming to us to try to sell us on their equipment and giving us development kits to try to build software for it. So we’ll build software for various ones but we’ll really wait and see how big the market is going to be.
He thinks it will take one to three years for the market to build up and, “longer term, five plus years away, I think there’s certainly a market there and it will be another exciting way to enjoy gaming.”
But the biggest challenge is the size of the market, which is why they aren’t making games for PlayStation Vita or Wii U:
We don’t make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough, the PS Vita – the Sony product – we don’t make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it’s all about the size of the market.
Previously asked about VR support in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, DICE General Manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson said it would never be a mass-market thing and “there’s a guy who did it and he says it himself: after a while this is a bit overwhelming. You have vertigo and first-person movement. How many people of the population out there wouldn’t throw up when they played that?”
What EA games would you like to play in VR?
[Source: Games Industry]
