In January, Portal designer Kim Swift joined EA Motive—the Jade Raymond-headed Electronic Arts studio founded in 2015. The developer is thought to be working on a untitled Star Wars game—now without the help of the ill-fated Visceral Games—and another as-yet unannounced project.
As reported by gamesindustry.biz, EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen touched upon the latter at the UBS Global Technology Conference, after name-dropping BioWare's anthem (who was recently merged with Motive).
"Less and less of our business is dependent on brand new titles. But we've been able to bring out some great new titles that have turned into franchises, like the Star Wars activity, like Battlefront, for example, that layer in more franchises over time," says Jorgensen. "We're trying to do that with BioWare's Anthem game—I was up in Edmonton with the team a few weeks ago, looking at the game and playing it. It's looking very exciting, the team's done an amazing job and we're really excited about that for next year.
"We have a team in Montreal that is building a brand new action franchise, probably for our Fiscal [Year] 2021 that also looks fantastic and very exciting. A new game, with a lot of new interesting gameplay that I don't think anyone's ever seen before."
Jorgensen continues, suggesting action games are an area in which EA hopes to expand—billing it "the largest sector in gaming". Jorgensen reckons the publisher's first-person shooters and sports titles have commandeered its focus, but that it feels like there is a "huge opportunity" on this front.
Elsewhere, Jorgensen suggests EA's rolling initiatives, such as FIFA and Madden's respective Ultimate Team features, create scope for "uncapped monetisation".
He says: "If you have a live service component to [games on EA Access and Origins Access], you can have a subscription that's uncapped," he said. "Give people a way to spend money on things they want to do and that they enjoy doing [versus] simply capping them at $9 or $10 per month and that's all they can ever spend.
"We find people play twice as many games, they spend twice as long on them, and they spend twice as much money, because you've reduced the cost of trial to close to zero."
This follows the recent turbulence EA has faced in relation to Battlefront 2's divisive loot crates and progression system.
More from Jorgensen can be read via gamesindustry.biz's full report.
