During a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Blake Jorgensen CFO of EA spoke about the potential of VR and whether the company is considering VR games development. “We are very prepared for being able to build VR games. We have made an investment over the last five years to move to a single engine that we built all our games on,” he stated.
“We are experimenting with a couple of a different players today that are VR players and we are making some small [experimental] titles rather than full blown games. The fundamental issue is that we need to create a large market in VR before we invest 50 to 100 million dollars in a big title. And when I say a large market, today there are 80 or 60 million new gen consoles, Xbox and PlayStation, sitting on the top of 150 million older generation consoles so that is a larger market. ”
“VR will be great and there are going to be a lot of applications for that including gaming. But I think it will be a few years off before we have a substantial VR market. We are prepared about it, we are excited about it, we can see some experiments coming out from our studio in the years to come that will help people understand the power [of VR].”
Furthermore he also spoke about the challenges about VR games development including motion sickness and the technology requiring more processing power to deliver a consistent experience.