EA

The game-changing impact of EA

EA (short for Electronic Arts) makes its home in Redwood City, California, where it was founded in May of 1982. They began as a publisher of PC software while working on techniques to ultimately develop their own games internally. In the resulting years EA would become one of the world’s largest and most profitable gaming companies, owning and operating numerous major development studios, and publishing many of the most recognizable franchises in video games.

EA’s mainstream success came in large part with their foray into sports, where they rose to fame beginning in the 1990’s as a household name for amazing licensed games for the NFL, NHL, NBA, FIFA, and more. EA truly set the standard for sports simulation in the 90’s, and continues to innovate and adapt as a leader in the industry today.

Throughout the 2000’s EA further parlayed its good fortune further by bringing even more great developers into the fold such as BioWare (Edmonton), DICE (Stockholm), Popcap Games (Seattle), and many more. Today EA is home to dozens of studios developing and publishing hit games across all major platforms.

EA Sports

EA Sports is a division of EA that naturally specializes in developing and publishing sports titles. Many brands under the EA Sports banner have been publishing annually for decades, and are consistently among the highest-performing video game releases each year. This includes titanic franchises such as Madden NFL (Football), FIFA (Soccer), NHL (Hockey), and NBA Live (Basketball).

The EA Sports family of games are regularly lauded for their immersive experience, featuring realistic graphics, an intelligent physics engine, engaging gameplay, and a wide variety of different modes of play. EA’s franchises are also not beholden to a specific platform, meaning that they publish across all major hardware including Sony (PlayStation), Microsoft (Xbox), Nintendo, PC, and mobile. EA Sports games are so popular that they even tend to be among the final games released on otherwise abandoned platforms, still selling units in incredible numbers to players who have not yet moved on to the latest hardware.

EA Worldwide Studios

In addition to its massively successful EA Sports line, Electronic Arts also manages a vast stable of developers under its EA Worldwide Studios moniker. Here EA publishes a plethora of gaming experiences across all genres from action-adventure to role playing, shooters, massively-multiplayer online games, and more. As the name suggests, EA Worldwide Studios are located across the globe, creating amazing gaming experiences for consoles, PC, and mobile devices.

A few of EA’s best-known studios include BioWare, creators of the hugely popular Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, DICE—best known for the Battlefield series of first-person shooters, and Criterion Games, who headline the Need for Speed series of racing games. These are just a handful of names that make up EA Worldwide Studios and the enormous catalogue of well-known gaming franchises they produce, which also includes blockbuster titles such as The Sims, Plants vs. Zombies, Star Wars: Battlefront, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and many, many more.

EA even owns its own proprietary video game engine. The “Frostbite” game engine (developed by DICE) is a cross-platform development tool employed by numerous EA studios as the backbone for many of the company’s biggest franchises. The Frostbite engine is known in particular for generating in-game innovations in areas such as destruction physics and environmental interactions.

With a huge family of amazing game studios located all over the world, EA is a top-tier publisher releasing many of the biggest and best known franchises in gaming across every major platform.