For more than 30 years, EA has been developing and publishing games, so it makes sense that the company would have a long list of titles in its back catalog. While the company many not be releasing quite as many games as it used to, it's still got a wide range of different series under its belt: there's Star Wars: Battlefront, Mass Effect, Madden, Need for Speed, Mirror's Edge—the list goes on.
And yet, even with all that variety, something's missing.
"If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don't have a lot."
That's from Patrick Soderlund, executive vice president of EA Studios, in an interview with IGN—and he's right. While most big action franchises are going open-world, EA is seemingly struggling to get its action games off the ground. Dead Space, EA's last big action franchise, hasn't been seen in years, and there's really nothing like it in EA's current lineup. Considering just how well open-world action games are doing lately, it's a massive hole in EA's library.
"EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin's Creed or Batman or [Grand Theft Auto] 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."
To do this, EA is investing in a new studio: Motive. Led by ex-Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond, the team will begin working with Visceral Games on its yet-to-be revealed Star Wars project, after which the team will branch out and start developing new properties for EA.
"...We're building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP...[Jade Raymond] wanted to try something different. 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."
It'll be interesting to see what comes from EA's new push into fresh IPs. Both Dead Space and Mirror's Edge were a result of the company's last major push, and both franchises were a hit with gamers. With any luck, EA will strike gold a second time.
EA's next big title, Star Wars: Battlefront, is due out on Nov. 17.
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