EA Enters Live Arcade Arena

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced its launch onto Microsoft’s Xbox Live® Arcade with Boom Boom Rocket™. The game is a hypnotic rhythm music game conceived by EA’s Pogo.com™ casual games design team and developed by Bizarre Creations, the developer who brought Project Gotham Racing® 3 to the Xbox 360™, and fan-favorite Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved to Xbox Live Arcade. The game is scheduled to go live Spring 2007 and is EA’s first title on Xbox Live Arcade.

GameDaily BIZ spoke with Chip Lange, EA's Vice President of Online Commerce, who when asked why it took this long for EA to get on XBLA, simply responded, "Now feels like the right time. Across EA there's been a lot of internal excitement about Arcade and we're at a point where we can dedicate resources to building Arcade games. We're very excited to be entering this space.

Indeed, now that EA's on board XBLA, it seems that the company is quite excited about it. Other XBLA games (yet to be announced) are currently being developed, and they're not all from Pogo. "While Pogo, with their expertise in the casual game segment, were quick out of the gate with some great concepts, they certainly won't be the only studio involved," Lange explained. "We'd like to use Xbox Live Arcade as a new place for EA and our studios to innovate and surprise gamers, and that's a challenge that we're opening up throughout EA."

GS: Can we expect EA games to be appearing on the Wii's Virtual Console service and the PS3 PlayStation Store in the future?

CL: I think it's safe to assume that any platform that has a good, solid business center and a community around it will be supported. I think we develop products on more platforms than any other publisher in the world. I'm not announcing anything on the Virtual Console or the PS3, but certainly we evaluate all of that, and we've got the development capacity to get our content to any platform where it matters.

GS: On these platforms, are the plans just for new titles like Boom Boom Rocket, or will we start to see catalog titles from the SNES and Genesis era, maybe a mix?

CL: What you can assume is that we're looking at the whole landscape. One of the nice things about EA is we've got such a wonderful library of classic IP...