EA To Embrace Online Multiplayer: "The Future Is Now"

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Now that EA has proven themselves this generation with Dead Space, perhaps some PlayStation 3 owners are willing to forgive and forget last year's debacle. You know, Madden 08 running at 30fps and all that jazz...and if you are one of those good forgiving people, you might be more interested in EA's plans for the future.

Like most everyone, the publisher has realized they need to embrace the online multiplayer aspect of the industry as quickly as possible. According to the Videogaming247 blog, EA Games president Frank Gibeau stressed this fact:

"It is an absolute imperative for the company to go online as fast as possible, and the more projects we can do that have scale and quality the better. That’s where, frankly, the head and the heart of the company are, is trying to get online in a really powerful way."

This isn't really a surprise, especially after the super big unveiling of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the LucasArts-developed MMO, which EA is slated to publish. These days, if you don't have an online multiplayer option with your game, chances are, it won't sell as well as the single-player titles did in the past. Furthermore, the strict MMOs (that's Massively Multiplayer Online; no single-player option is available) are starting to become more and more popular as time goes on. Gibeau believes "the future is now" and that future centers squarely on the Internet for gaming. He added:

"It’s a key strategy for the company to drive our online businesses as aggressively as possible. It’s clearly the future, and the future is now. If you look at Asia, you look at where people are spending their time, where I play games: it’s just the place we want to be. What’s so powerful about the technology is connected gameplay is so cool for our creators. The games actually designing and building the games are just starting to scratch the surface in terms of how you can entertain in a massively multiplayer environment, a connected environment."

So down the road, you can bet that EA will have several big announcements for us, and many of them will revolve around online multiplayer. Some gamers may not be too fond of the idea, but despite all this, we still aren't predicting a speedy death for the single-player campaign in a video game. Not with recently released gems like MGS4 and GTAIV out there...more of those will come, too, we promise.

10/23/2008 Ben Dutka

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