GameDaily have an interesting interview with EA VP of marketing Frank Gibeau in which he predicts a lot of industry consolidation as mid-sized and small games companies get hit hard by a "brutal transition" to next-generation consoles.He also remarks on Nintendo's continuing success in the face of heavyweights Microsoft and Sony, and we're given an insight into how EA studio's are set up to keep development costs down:
We have a single studio backbone, which we build off, which is our library systems. So when a team at Tiburon builds the physics for ball movement we can use that in other sports games or games that have balls... When somebody writes a physics engine for driving games, we can take it and adapt it from Burnout to Need for Speed or on to NASCAR. Now you customize it to each of the current games so they don't feel or play the same, but the base engineering and programming and physics work ... the fact that you do it once and you have a single library system means you do it once instead of three times or four times and that's vital. I've seen other companies where each team has its own physics engine and they end up wasting cycles.
EA Weighs In on Next-Gen, Transitions, Rising Costs and More via Slashdot
Electronic Arts on the Future of Gaming
About EA
Discussion >>
