EA Mobile head, Frank Gibeau, has had his say on the potential of the Apple Watch - which was revealed alongside the new iPhone’s earlier this week - and revealed that he already has people prototyping for the new hardware.
The developers work on much more than just smartphones and tablets; they’re also one of EA’s main representatives for wearable technology, including Google Glass and the recently announced Samsung Gear VR.
Gibeau stated: “We got real excited about Apple Watch. Wearables could be the future gaming platforms. Look at Oculus, Google Glass, Apple Watch, Samsung’s announcement last week. There are unique functions and ways to interact with these devices that open up a new platform.” He admits “Some ideas are going to work, some aren’t. I see it as a potentially very viable platform. … But we just found out about the watch in a material way, so we have to have time before we gravitate toward one idea or the other.”
According to Gamesindustry.biz, around half a dozen prototypes are currently in development, with a lot of them working in some way with EA Sports mobile games (for instance, running a certain distance in real life could unlock a feature in the mobile game).
Gibeau’s claim that mobile gaming is on par with the current generation of consoles is questionable and it likely to stir up some debate. The example he uses is a mobile prototype for Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, which runs on mobile devices using the Frostbite engine, and says that he expects playable products using the premiere graphics engine soon; however, he freely admits that this is not the case with all mobile devices.
“In some combination of devices, we’re kind of there,” he says. “On others, it’s a little hard. The thing about mobile is there are 60,000 flavors of handsets each year. Some are extraordinarily high performance - and given that you’re looking at a small screen that’s right in front of you, pound for pound, it’s right there.”
Mobile technology is updated every year, allowing for the platform to close the gap between it and consoles. Gibeau moved over from running EA’s console game business to the mobile one around one year ago, due to the focus EA is putting on the mobile market. Gibeau claims that mobile is, in many ways, the future of EA.
“If you look at the market… mobile has a strong growth path in front of it,” he says. “Then you’ve got wearables on top of that. At EA, we look at it as an especially powerful strategic path for us. … We’ve been a premium business - and we’ve been changing the company from the ground up to become a services business. We have an optimistic and profoundly bright view of the future because of this platform expansion in mobile.”
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