EA wants to start streaming games within three years

The financial chief of Electronic Arts announced in a lecture that the company is working on a streaming service for games that should be active within 2 to 3 years. The publisher works with an unknown partner for this.

Blake Jorgensen, CFO of Electronic Arts, made the announcement at the UBS Global Technology Conference in San Francisco. The CEO did not release many details. He expects the service to start in two to three years and lets go that EA will not only set up the service, but work with a partner whose name he does not disclose.

Jorgensen stated in his speech that as far as EA is concerned, the time is right to switch to streaming. The time was not right until now because there were not enough data centers to properly serve people in remote areas. In recent years, however, companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple have built many data centers, which must guarantee a stable service, according to the CFO.

While Jorgensen did not disclose the partner’s name, he did specifically mention Microsoft’s plans. Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox division, announced similar plans earlier this month. The console builder hopes to be able to offer the service in 2020, which corresponds to the planning that Jorgensen outlines.

During his speech, the CFO also looked ahead to the games that the publisher has planned, and especially mentioned the game that is being made under the leadership of Jade Raymond. The as-yet-unnamed project is being created in Montreal by EA Motive, a new studio where a team of more than 100 people has been working on the game since 2015. According to Jorgensen, it will be an action game, a genre in which EA has the largest market share according to the CFO. Moreover, a genre in which EA has profiled itself too little. According to the CFO, EA was too focused on sports games and shooters. Anthem, the new game from BioWare, also falls into that category. The BioWare game will be released in 2018. Jorgensen will not announce when the EA Motive project will be finished.