EA is a massive company, and as such their portfolio of genres is pretty big. Sports, RPGs, shooters: they’ve got a broad range of IPs going on over there. You’ll notice though that they don’t have any open world games, which is odd considering they’re the current big thing.
Naturally, EA don’t want to miss out on this area, and so are in the process of creating new games and IPs in this genre to compete with the likes of Assassin’s Creed and GTA.
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Talking to IGN, EA’s executive vice president Patrick Soderlund said: “”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.”
The company’s solution comes in the form of Motive, EA’s newest studio headed up by ex-Ubisoft veteran Jade Raymond. Having previously worked on steering the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Raymond knows a thing or two about making mega-successful open world games. IGN asked if Motive’s plans were to create a game on a similar kind of scale.
“Maybe. I’m not suggesting we’re going to go after GTA and sell 50 million units,” said Soderlund. “We would love to! But what I’m saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do. And I think for us to do that, we need the right people.”
According to Soderlund, Jade Raymond wants to tackle another big action game, and so the studio are going in that direction. First, however, Motive will be helping out Visceral on Amy Hennig’s Star Wars game.