EA Games President, Frank Gibeau was interviewed by CNET recently and commented on two “jobs” that EA needs to partake very soon. The first “job” is keeping quality “talent”, like artists and developers, at the forefront of projects. The second, and more applicable for this articles is to “move to an online model as fast as [it] possibly can.” Gibeu had this to say regarding online gaming and EA:
“If you look at our customers’ behavior patterns, you’re seeing them engaging with fully connected experiences. And I think we have IPs and ideas and expertise that can really allow us to do that. I think Spore is a connected experience. I think Battlefield is, and Warhammer. These can be very lucrative for us, and they can be very exciting from a developer standpoint, because you’re moving from a fire-and-forget model to more of a service model, where you launch the game but you’re thinking 24-7 about when’s my first content pack, what’s happening with telemetry, how are people playing the game, and how do I make their experiences better?”
Gibeau also noted that he is no longer interested in single-player games. Any game that gets the go under his watch will have multiplayer elements. What do you all think about his direction?
