Despite PC Talk, Electronic Arts Still Has Big Console Plans

Electronic Arts has made headlines because the company talked about the PC gaming space as being the most promising one for the coming year, with a lot of growth potential and the possibility of becoming more important than the PlayStation 3, the Wii and the Xbox 360 combined.

But Frank Gibeau, who is the president of the EA Games label, believes that Electronic Arts needs to have a diverse portfolio of games in order to succeed in being the most important publisher in the gaming space.

Speaking about the plans Electronic Arts has for the console space, Frank Gibeau said, “What’s interesting is the displays are maxed out already. Once you get to 1080p, it’s not about increasing resolution.”

He says, “more computing horsepower is nice, but to be honest, the Xbox 360 and PS3 still have a lot of horsepower that hasn’t been tapped. I really think the next innovation is in the input device, but even more importantly, what will the online experience be like?”

The Xbox 360 and the PlayStaton 3 have joined the ranks of motion tracking controlled console with the Kinect and the PlayStation Move, but there is a small number of developers that are using the new control methods for their titles.

The MMO genre is still mostly linked to the PC and the big upcoming projects, like Star Wars: The Old Republic from EA subsidiary BioWare, the Blizzard-made Titan and Guild Wars 2 are still linked to the PC, with no plans of moving to the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3.

Electronic Arts also has tasted success in the Facebook driven social gaming space, with its Playfish division being the second biggest developer during the month of January, when more than 6.6 million players played their games.

The biggest upcoming launches from Electronic Arts include Crysis 2, a new Medal of Honor game, Battlefield 3 from DICE and Star Wars: The Old Republic.