EA Sports is opening new studio in Madrid, Spain, according to an announcement by EA Sports Vice President and COO Daryl Holt at Gamelab Barcelona 2018. The new division will join the already existing EA studio and will work on the NBA Live franchise alongside the company’s Orlando, Florida, studio.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz after the announcement, Holt said that game development has come to the point where it “doesn’t have to all be in one location.” He goes on to add that distributed game development has evolved from just simply outsourcing parts of development to making entire games across multiple collaborating studios.
This type of development has worked for several studios including EA’s own FIFA franchise, which is developed across three of its divisions – Bucharest, Vancouver, and Cologne. The success of this format for FIFA’s development helped the company decide to do the same for its NBA Live franchise.
According to Holt, the decision to choose Madrid as the location for its new division was because of the location’s “good development pipeline,” which includes both experienced developers and new talent coming straight out of universities. He goes on to explain, “We met with the universities and they have a nice set of programs to develop young talent, there’s experienced game developers here, there seem to be a lack of jobs necessary in the industry to keep them here and to continue to grow.”
EA Sports recently announced the latest entry into the NBA Live series, NBA Live 19, at the EA Play press event right before E3 2018. The new game is set to release on September 7, 2018, for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. With this latest announcement, it looks like EA Sports has a lot of plans for the franchise, which has been struggling over the past decade until last year’s well-received NBA Live 18 was released.
