After getting repeated negative reviews from the community in the recent years, EA took up the stance of being a ‘player-first’ organisation. Some time last summer, right after the introduction of this model, EA’s stock prices sky rocketed drastically to an all-time high.
Being the makers of widely popular IPs like Battlefield and publishers of Titanfall, EA seems to be trying to follow up this model as they have just announced the initiation of EA Worldwide, which will bring together several of the company’s development studios under one title.
EA, CEO, Andrew Wilson announced the news through a post over EA’s website. The move will bring together several studios like EA Mobiles and Maxis.
The statement from the CEO reads:
The formation of EA Worldwide Studios. At a time when players are engaged in games across more devices, the tenets of making great HD and mobile experiences are converging. Our ability to blend our strengths to deliver amazing games across genres, geographies and platforms, in a networked environment, is central to our future success. EA Worldwide Studios will bring together our top creative talent in all of our great studios to work on EA’s powerful brand portfolio and new IP. EA Mobile and Maxis will join this central studios organisation led by Patrick Söderlund. Samantha Ryan, who will now report to Patrick, will continue to lead our Mobile and Maxis teams. Sam will also take on leadership of BioWare, where her love for RPGs and experience with open-world adventure games is an outstanding fit to work with Aaryn Flynn and his great team.
Apart from this, the EA-familiar Frostbite Engine team would be converging into the business’s technology side and will be led by chief technology officer, Ken Moss.
The Frostbite team joins our Technology organisation. Our drive to power everything we do at EA with world-class technology has never been stronger. Players expect innovative, stable and secure experiences, and the strong combination of our Frostbite engine and our digital platform will make this possible. As a result, our central Frostbite Engine team will move to the CTO group led by Ken Moss.
With this new move, EA would be trying to become a better organisation in the players’ perspective. They would probably announce games which are still in development, offer more betas to players or even delay games if more polish needs to be done. Let’s see how it works out for them.