EA wants to make ‘gigantic action games’ like GTA and Assassin’s Creed

Electronic Arts has some pretty big games under its belt. Although the company already has a pretty diverse portfolio — consisting of games that fill the sports, shooter, RPG, and mobile categories — there's one genre the publisher/developer feels like it's missing out on: the "gigantic action" games space, which includes games like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed.

"If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don't have a lot," Patrick Soderlund, Executive Vice President of EA Studios, told IGN. "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 can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn't been done before."

Soderlund seemed realistic in his vision, adding, "I’m not suggesting we're going to go after GTA and sell 50 million units. We would love to! But what I'm saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do. And I think for us to do that, we need the right people."

One of those "people" could be Jade Raymond, a former Ubisoft veteran producer who was recently hired to head EA's newly formed Motive Studios. While Motive is currently assisting in the development on Visceral's unannounced Star Wars project, led by ex-Naughty Dog director Amy Hennig, it's possible Motive is also working on something new for EA that could fill that big-budget action void that Soderlund is talking about.

"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," Soderlund said.

"[Jade Raymond] wanted to try something different," he continued. "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."

[IGN]