Apple Announcement Reaction: Bringing Next Generation Gaming to the Palm of your Hand

It felt like Christmas Day yesterday here at EA. Our mobile teams were gathered together, and we loved what we saw from Apple during their big keynote.

Here’s what was obvious: the combination of the beautiful screen, stronger processing power, better battery life and increased storage capacity tells us that we’re getting to next generation console-level capabilities with the new devices.  Right in the palm of your hand.

As developers, we love the Retina display – more fidelity on the screen, along with more real estate to play on, means better game experiences. Metal is a real game changer for us as well – it unlocks tons of opportunities, including new shaders and texture memory to create richer environments, advanced AI, frame rate stability and an overall level of immersion that’s really impressive. And let’s be honest: give a game maker more storage size, and we’re going to take it and run with it to bring higher quality experiences to our players.

We’ve worked over the summer to be ready for the new OS, and we’ll be there in a couple of weeks with our full existing portfolio when iOS8 goes live. We also have a dozen games in the pipeline that will launch over the next year, and today we’re announcing the first three. FIFA 15 Ultimate Team will be available later this month. Then Peggle Blast and SimCity BuildIt will launch in the fall. All three are built specifically for mobile, and now with the capabilities of the iPhone 6 and iOS 8, all three will be bigger and better when they hit over the next few months.

We loved what we saw with the new phones, and I think these new developments play to our strengths. I’m also interested to see more about Apple’s new watch – clearly wearables are intriguing as an emerging gaming platform. We have a small group already prototyping ideas right now. We’re thinking about app extensions that could let you dictate gameplay on your phone or console, like accessing the “Team Driver” feature in Real Racing 3 that allows players to make passive progress by having their team driver complete race events when they’re not actively playing the game on their phones.

It’s early days for more awesome new technology, and the timeline for innovation in mobile is lightning fast. We’ll see what we come up with and will keep you posted along the way.