With new discussions regarding the Xbox 720 and PS4 coming in at a rapid pace, on Feb. 12 Electronic Arts' chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen discussed details around the cost of the new console transition and next generation projects coming from EA.
Speaking with Gamasutra, Jorgensen explains that the previous console transition was troublesome for a few different reasons. One of these reasons was the presence of too many titles. He explains that EA was overloaded with titles in the last generation, which made it tremendously more expensive to convert to a new generation of consoles.
"We're much more focused now. We've got a core group of ten-to-fifteen titles. We'll stage those in terms of the transition and manage those costs through that. Our goal is to keep the cost increase for R&D under $100 million. And some of that will be in this year, some of that in '14, and some in our fiscal year '15.”
Speaking about the implementation of the Frostbite engine to the PS4 and Xbox 720, Jorgensen states that due to the presence of the “Battlefield” franchise always moving forward with the PC platform, transitioning from current generation systems to the Xbox 720 and PS4 with this engine has not caused a spike in cost.
"The other key advantage for us is we've been building those types of titles on Frostbite, which is our proprietary engine. Moving Frostbite up to gen-four was a big task, but once you've done that, you now can do that across multiple titles as long as they're using the Frostbite engine.”
EA has been going through this process in the last year, with early products looking fantastic. “It will be interesting to see how it plays out as it ultimately gets finished."
For those interested, you can view a few concept photos of the Xbox 720 and PS4 in the slideshow featured above this article.
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