Electronic Arts has big plans for sports titles. The company said that over the next five years it is going to double their audience: from 230 million to 500 million people.
This was stated by Daryl Holt, head of EA Sports, in an interview with Axios. He explained that his division wants to try new business models and enter new markets. It also intends to regularly add fresh content to projects and strengthen social functions in them.
Changes may also affect the frequency of the release of games. Now EA Sports annually releases sequels of its key franchises: FIFA, Madden NFL and NHL. But according to Holt, perhaps in the future it will move away from this format and will not publish the next parts of titles, but major updates to them.
“In the gaming industry, everything is moving towards making fewer new releases and releasing updates more often. Hence the reason why new content appears in Fortnite rather than Fortnite 2 coming out.” Holt said.
Nevertheless, Holt added that in the near future the company will not stop publishing new versions of at least Madden NFL every year.
Another way to increase the audience in EA Sports games will be to work with new sports. According to Holt, the company plans to develop games about golf, baseball and college football. For this, for example, she recently bought the mobile studio Playdemic, the authors of Golf Clash.
Whether EA Sports will return to the NBA Live basketball franchise (the last game in the series was released in 2018) — Holt did not directly answer. He confirmed that the company is working on several next-gen projects about basketball, but did not say which games are in question.