EA must get online – says EA President

Electronic Art’s Worldwide President Frank Gibneau says that EA must continue it’s push into online based games.

“It is an absolute imperative for the company to go online as fast as possible, and the more projects we can do that have scale and quality the better,” he said at an EA event in San Francisco.

“That’s where, frankly, the head and the heart of the company are, is trying to get online in a really powerful way,” he continued. “It’s a key strategy for the company to drive our online businesses as aggressively as possible. It’s clearly the future, and the future is now.”

The challenge, and the rewards, for developers is developing games that can engage and entertain in a massively multiplayer environment.  The games currently taken online by EA include Warhammer, and Star Wars.

MMOG games have traditionally revolved around the fantasy worlds, with games such as world of warcraft, with its 10 million plus subscribing players creating whole online and offline communities.  The challenge now is to take other types of games into that massively multiplayer environment. 

Many previous console games revolve around a single central character who has a mission, these games are perfect for a single player, or a small group of players playing together in a single environment.  It will be interesting to see if these types of games can move into a MMOG environment.

It maybe that we see the growth of a whole new genre of games, with the traditional single hero player becoming a thing of the past.  The biggest selling genre of games historically have been the “shoot ‘em up” type games, and this concept will need to be tailored quite heavily for a connected environment.

Some of the newer genres of games, those which have been popular with girls, women, and more maturer players will suit a massively multiplayer environment far better, picking up on the underlying social networking which plays a key part in an connected environment.

Although some of EA’s strongest games include the SIMS, and Sports games which will suit a “league” environment very well, many of their action genre games may struggle more.  Can you imagine playing Mercenaries with another several thousand mercenaries all playing head to head at the same time – you profit from Chaos, but too much chaos stops the fun.