Longtime Electronic Arts executive Frank Gibeau has resigned from the company after spending more than 20 years with it. Gibeau has had a significant influence on EA’s mobile efforts and was formerly the executive vice president for EA Mobile at one point.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about Gibeau’s resignation, stating that, “Frank Gibeau has chosen to transition on from Electronic Arts. Throughout a more than 20-year career, Frank’s made many significant contributions to the company, our people and our games. Most recently, he’s worked to strengthen EA Mobile by building a great team. We’d like to thank Frank for his achievements at EA, and we wish him all the best in his next chapter.”

Polygon reports Wilson stating that this won’t be the end for EA’s mobile efforts. On the contrary, mobile titles would still be a focus and now mobile dev teams would be reporting directly to Wilson in the meantime.

What are your thoughts on Gibeau’s retirement, especially with regards to his future direction? Let us know in the comments below.

Apple revealed its first smartwatch yesterday with the Apple Watch but revealed with the announcement of the iPhone 6 that it had several game publishers signing up to create mobile games. EA is one of them but according to mobile content executive Frank Gibeau, the team is currently working on prototypes for the Apple Watch as well.

Speaking to CNET, Gibeau stated that, “We have two teams prototyping wearable experiences that are not only standalone, but also some ideas where you can actually use the fitness component in the watch that can unlock capabilities in the game that might be on your iPhone.

“Or you could do crafting or some other auction trading on your watch that goes back into your tablet game that you might check out later when you get home. So, we’re pretty excited about it. We think it’s very early days. But for EA, the emergence of another gaming platform is compelling for us.”

Excited? Let us know in the comments.

Electronic Arts has been seeing several departures in the past few months, with developers from PopCap Interactive, Criterion and recently with Chillingo as well. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter recently spoke to VG247 about these departures, especially Chillingo since, “The Chillingo founders are really the glue that holds that organization together, so I think their departure is a big deal.

“I don’t know the Criterion guys well, but I would say that the departure of the two co-founders is less of a big deal, as they haven’t worked on any original IP since Black. They are really talented, but I think that the remaining crew is capable of backfilling.

“The Chillingo guys are a lot harder to replace than many of the others, since Chillingo is such a small team and had such a high success rate.

Pachter also gave his take on who would be next, naming EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau. “I don’t expect any high profile departures, other than Frank Gibeau. He was reassigned to a much less influential position and promptly sold all of his stock, so I think he is planning a move soon.”

On being asked whether COO Peter Moore would depart any time soon, Pachter said, “Peter is an old guy and has a lot of money, so he’s probably ready to stop working and start enjoying his life, but I would expect him to stick around a couple more years to help Andrew ease into the CEO role. They are close, and I think Peter has agreed to help mentor Andrew.”

It will certainly be interesting to see how EA proceeds in the coming months, especially since we’re only two months into the next console generation. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.

Originally, Gibeau had stated during an internal EA presentation that this was most certainly the case, though both PopCap and EA didn’t comment on the matter. As of now, the Android port is expected to release in the Fall, though as of now there is no confirmation on the same.

Overall, Plants vs. Zombies 2 has been racking up great sales on iOS, with about 25 million downloads in little more than a month. Despite controversies surrounding the micro-transactions within the game, the game has received excellent critical acclaim. What are your thoughts on Apple buying off EA (or not)? Let us know below.

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“We had, frankly, too much capacity inside of our EA Partners team to handle more projects than we were in position to want to have right now. That was what was the scaling back of it was. But Partners is open for business,” stated Gibeau.

As for rumours that the program might be in danger of closing down, he stated that, “I don’t think the communication of that has been particularly well executed on our part.

“We are absolutely open for business to partner with developers out there. In fact on mobile, as an example, with our Chillingo team, we just published three games this week.

“On the console front, honestly, when you’re in a transition, you tend to focus in on your internal titles and put must of your attention there and most of your capital to make sure you get your studios positioned and configured for that. So we’re definitely looking to do that.”

EA Partners is a co-publishing arm of the giant which lends itself to publishing and distributing games from third party developers. This has included developers such Grasshopper Manufacture, Harmonix, Epic Games and Crytek. It will be showcasing Respawn Entertainment’s TitanFall this week at E3 2013.

Source: GamesIndustry International

The boss of perhaps the biggest video game publisher in the world recently talked about every single game under his command featuring online features. But he phrases it a bit differently.

“We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be developed as a singleplayer experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365.”

It’s easy to misconstrue, but facts are facts: As far as EA is concerned, single-player alone simply isn’t happening at the company. You thank thank micro-transactions and DLC for that (and now free-to-play games).

“One of our biggest growth opportunities is Play4Free titles that allow customers to play at no cost and make purchases via microtransactions. We see this as a huge opportunity, and one that’s powered by our hybrid cloud model,” said Gibeau.

Source: Superannuation via Destructoid