EA wants in on the Assassin’s Creed and GTA action

Sports, shooting, mobile – EA is at the top of its game in many genres, but the open-world action genre is one in which it admits it falls short.

That, executive VP of EA Studios Patrick Soderlund has told IGN, is exactly the situation that Jade Raymond’s new EA studio Motive has been designed to address.

"If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don’t have a lot," Soderlund said. "EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin’s Creed or Batman or GTA or those types of games that are really big. The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what we can bring to gamers that maybe hasn’t been done before."

"I’m not suggesting we’re going to go after GTA and sell 50m units. We would love to! But what I’m saying is those types of absolutely triple-A, big productions is what we want to do.

And I think for us to do that, we need the right people. You need a leadership and people that have done this in the best and they’ve done it successfully in the past. That, coupled with a large ambition to invest in new IP. We want to. We’re building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP.

"[Jade Raymond] wanted to try something different. She wanted to build action games and we were going in that direction…. It kind of came together, and that’s why we did it."