The App Store arms race is on! That was the message EA Mobile's Head of Worldwide Studios delivered at his GDC morning presentation earlier today, where EA announced no less than 14 iPhone games currently in development for 2009.
Boatman opened with a broad overview of EA Mobile's business, which is still very much built around hitting every single mobile device it can, on a global basis. That's what's made EA Mobile the number 1 mobile games publisher in the world, according to Boatman (and depending on who you ask and how you count. Gameloft is somewhere up there too).
In any case, Boatman went on to say that smartphone gaming is the fastest-growing segment of the business. EA Mobile is well aware of this, which is why it's reoriented its resources towards the iPhone in a big way. Another major focus for the company going forward will be social gaming, where iPhone and online gaming will tie together through technologies like Facebook Connect; EA Mobile mounted a quick demo of the new FB Connect-enabled Scrabble, which just launched via App Store update.
And then it was on to the main event--the game announcements!
The games are:
American Idol
BATTLESHIP
CLUE
Command & Conquer
CONNECT 4
EA SPORTS NBA Live
EA SPORTS FIFA 09
Madden NFL 10
MONOPOLY
Mystery Mania
RISK
Spore Creatures
SSX
Tiger Woods
Trivial Pursuit
Wolfenstein RPG
Two more games we know of that weren't announced are The Sims 3 and Need For Speed Undercover.
We have hands-on video of Tiger Woods and Trivial Pursuit, so be sure to check those games out. They're looking really good.
EA Mobile and ngmoco are clearly dueling for pole position in the industry's consciousness; while ngmoco's Neil Young made some impressive technology and platform announcements during his keynote yesterday, Boatman opted to wow us with EA Mobile's portfolio, as if to say, "that's nice, but where are all your popular entertainment brands?" Time will tell which strategy is best.
6 Comments
Wow.... 14 games (plus 2!). While most of these names are kind of bland to me, I am curious to see what they do with SSX, the new Spore game, and The Sims 3. Need for Speed has looked amazing so far as well!
That said, ngmoco:) is the best iPhone developer in my eyes. Quality over quantity is something that EA struggles with sometimes. I guess we will see how this turns out.
And don't take Gameloft off of the list of companies dueling for the prime position in the industry. They have a huge portion of the market.
Yeah, don't forget Gameloft. They've got 27 games on the App Store, and a couple dozen more in development... although they're not showing any at GDC, unfortunately.
Yeah, but Gameloft never updates. Begins to piss people off. ngmoco:) focuses on quality and updates, which is really nice.
As for EA MOBILE, these all look nice, but they need to bring out Need for Speed before any of these. Seriously.
wasnt there something said yesterday about how gameloft loses a lot of money because they just put out a lot of games?
Yeah, Gameloft has never made much in the way of profit... their operation is too large. They've got 4000 employees worldwide!
Correction: Gameloft has actually been profitable for the last 4 years. 3700 of their 4000 employees are in production.
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