Electronic Arts recently secured a deal with Disney to exclusively develop future Star Wars games, but it looks like they have also secured a pretty big licensing agreement for its FIFA brand.
EA announced they have closed another licensing deal with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) to extend their existing agreement until the end of 2022, which means EA Sports’ titles will continue to have exclusive rights to both the FIFA brand and FIFA World Cup name. (more…)
EA’s Frostbite 3 engine, which underpins many of the company’s next generation titles, looks like it won’t support Nintendo’s Wii U. Johan Andersson, Technical Director of the Frostbite project at EA DICE, says the company tested Frostbite 2 on the console and found the results to be “not too promising,” to the point where it “chose not to go down [the] path” of porting the next version. Leaked slides from earlier this year revealed that EA has approximately 15 games in development that use Frostbite 3, the implication being that Wii U gamers are going to miss out on some fairly big titles, including Battlefield 4, Star Wars, the next Mass Effect and, as Joystiq pointed out last week, this year’s version of Madden NFL. It all adds up to a notable loss of support for the new console — but hey, EA-style gaming was hardly a core part of the Nintendo experience in the first place.
Battlefield 4 is expected to be released later this year, and while it is the fourth game in the rather successful Battlefield franchise, is EA overreaching when they think that gamers might still be interested in Battlefield games say, 20 years later? We’re not sure what the motives are behind EA’s actions, but it seems that the publisher has registered for new Battlefield domain names, ranging from Battlefield 13 right up to Battlefield 20! Of course there is a good chance that EA is simply protecting themselves from cyber-squatters who might try to sell the domain to them for an exorbitant amount of money, rather than actually planning to pursue the Battlefield franchise right up to Battlefield 20! Interestingly Activision, EA’s competitor in terms of Modern Warfare, has not gone to the same extent. In any case we doubt this is an indication of EA’s future plans, but it is still interesting to take note of anyway.
Electronic Arts has reported its Q4 2013 earnings, and the company boasted a $1.04 billion revenue, which is up from $977 million a year ago. Net income also saw a growth from last year, with $169 million in cold, hard profit for the quarter, compared to $56 million during the same quarter last year. However, it was the game sales that EA really wanted to show off.
Since the game’s launch in March, SimCity has sold over 1.6 million copies so far, even despite the fiasco that erupted during launch. EA says that half of these sales were from digital downloads, meaning that 800,000 copies of the game were sold through EA’s Origin gaming service alone, which is quite impressive.
As for other games that EA highlights, FIFA 13 has sold over 14.5 million copies in EA’s fiscal year 2013 so far, and EA says that Battlefield 3 Premium has over 3.5 million subscribers to date. As for the company’s latest iOS game, Real Racing 3 has seen more than 30 million downloads, and has been averaging over 2.5 million daily active users since its launch.
Despite all the hate that EA has been getting lately, including its “Worst Company in America” award for the second straight year, EA claims that they were the number one publisher in “Western retail markets” during the past quarter, as well as the number one publisher in the world when it comes to iOS games. Sales speak for themselves, we suppose.
The SimCity series was first launched in 1989 and was created by game designer Will Wright. However, the man who built the series wasn’t a part of the latest SimCity launch that took place earlier this year. Instead, he sat back and watched the show, but it obviously was a bit painful to watch, and Wright wan’t too thrilled about how things went.
However, when speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Wright says that he “feels bad for the team,” but predicted that there would most likely be some backlash based around DRM issues and complaints. Wright says that the launch fiasco was “basically inexcusable,” and paying $60 for game that you can’t play it will obviously cause a lot of outrage, and Wright certainly understands that.
Then again, Wright says that the new game is “good,” and he enjoys “playing it a lot,” but the launch was pretty much a disaster for Electronic Arts. Even if the game publisher finally fixed all the issues with the game, the memory is still there of the time that you couldn’t access the game that you paid big money for.
In a slightly-related note, Electronic Arts will be sending out an update for SimCity sometime this week that will address a handful of issues. The update tweaks traffic routing, phantom air pollution, stuck school buses, and stuck university students crossing roads. Other updates include a slew of new items, as well as some audio fixes.
Come on, admit it: you’ve all secretly been longing for more Plants vs. Zombies action, right? Well fans, today’s your lucky day. PopCap‘s just uploaded a YouTube video announcing that the sequel to its wildly successful game — appropriately called Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time — will be launched this July. The company makes fun of itself in the video, which shows frustrated gamers yelling and asking for a sequel to the popular game. It’s unclear which platform the new title will support at launch, but the original Plants vs. Zombies — which is four years old now — first appeared on Mac and PC in 2009 before making its way to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, PS Vita, Chrome, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and even Bada (!). The game’s success was likely one of the reasons EA acquired the company in 2011. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to find our Samsung Wave review unit so we can play Plants vs. Zombies on that long forgotten mobile OS. Hit the break for PopCap’s video.
In the first week of April, Disney announced that it was pulling the plug on LucasArts. The studio said that it had made up its mind to shift LucasArts from a developing model to a licensing model. What this meant was that other developers would be allowed to create Star Wars games under license from Disney. Electronic Arts has now officially been confirmed as the exclusive developer of new Star Wars titles. EA’s job is to handle the core gaming audience.
EA’s three top studios will be developing these titles. The BioWare team will continue developing for Star Wars franchise whereas DICE and Visceral will now be on-board as well. EA Labels president Frank Gibeau has said that the titles might borrow from films, though the games will be entirely original with an entirely different gameplay and stories. EA has not yet revealed what will happened to the Star Wars titles that were under development before LucasArts was shut down, the Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assualt. All that EA has said on this matter is that they’re not announcing any specific titles at this point in time.
Electronic Arts and Disney announced a multi-year agreement today that will see future Star Wars video games exclusively developed and published by EA. This news comes a little over a month after the house of mouse made the decision to stop internal development at LucasArts. EA’s developers scheduled to take on the Star Wars universe include DICE (Battlefield), Visceral (Dead Space) and BioWare, the latter of which will continue development of its already released Star Wars MMO (The Old Republic). The financial terms of the agreement have yet to be disclosed, but EA will create games for a “core gaming audience” while Disney will produce casual titles for mobile and social outlets. Now that the force is strong with EA, our fingers are crossed for a new installment in the KOTOR franchise.
In a piece of news that informs on the future of Star Wars video games after Disney shut down LucasArts last month, Disney and Electronic Arts have signed a multi-year agreement that will see the game publisher obtain exclusive rights to the Star Wars video game franchise, allowing them to make Star Wars video games from here on out.
Electronic Arts says that DICE and Visceral Games will produce new Star Wars titles in the future, as they join BioWare, who is continuing to develop games for the franchise. As for what to expect in upcoming games from EA, the company’s Labels President, Frank Gibeau, says that the new games will be “entirely original with all new stories and gameplay,” with some elements being borrowed from past films.
However, the agreement between EA and Disney doesn’t give the game publisher all the rights to the Star Wars game franchise, as Disney will still retain the rights for “mobile, social, tablet and online game.” Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but we’re guessing it was for quite a large sum of money, especially for something so popular like Star Wars.
However, this gets us thinking as to how these upcoming Star Wars games will be published. Electronic Arts doesn’t have a very good track record, and they were recently voted the “worst company in America” for the second straight year, which has us worried about the Star Wars franchise. It’s possible that EA could turn things around by the time they release a new Star Wars game, but we’ll ultimately have to wait and see.
If you’ve been waiting impatiently for the Plants vs. Zombies sequel, the wait is almost over. Electronic Arts-owned PopCap Games has announced that Plants vs. Zombies 2 will be releasing sometime in July, and the game studio has released a trailer to celebrate the announcement, but don’t get your hopes up, as it doesn’t reveal any gameplay.
It seems that the official title of the game is “Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time,” playing off of the fact that many gamers have been waiting for a sequel for what seems like forever, although it seems odd that they’re subtitling the game after the impatience of gamers, rather than address what the game is about, but it’s possible that it could just be a working title.
The trailer above is essentially just a supercut of various fans and internet celebrities asking when a Plants vs. Zombies sequel will release, including Francis and Microsoft’s Major Nelson (Xbox Live chief Larry Hyrb). Then at the end of the trailer, we get a look at the logo art, as well as the release date for the upcoming game.
PopCap has not released any footage from the game, or have they announced what platforms the game will release on. Initially, the first Plants vs. Zombies title was only available for mobile devices, but the game studio quickly released versions for consoles and PC. We would expect the same thing to happen for the sequel.
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Battlefield 4 is expected to be released 
