Using our patents to drive positive play

At Electronic Arts, our mission is to inspire the world to play. We are passionate about delivering amazing video games that create unique experiences, tell memorable stories with inclusive characters, and bring communities together to enjoy a positive playing experience. 

Innovation, creativity and inclusivity are fundamental to achieving this. Those values drive us to provide gaming experiences that are constantly improving - getting faster, safer, more realistic, unique, and customizable, but also inclusive so everyone can enjoy them. Our patent program highlights and celebrates the innovation at Electronic Arts, including pioneering solutions towards making play positive for everyone.  

Today, we’re taking our patent program to the next level by announcing a new patent pledge aimed at sharing with the broader game development community some of our most innovative technology, which has been designed to make our games more accessible. Through this pledge, we hope to encourage more developers to build new features that make video games more inclusive.

Championing and Promoting innovation 

Our patents program is designed to do two things: recognize our hard-earned and pioneering inventions and promote innovation and creativity at Electronic Arts and in the industry. 

We encourage our inventors to think big - to come up with creative and bold solutions to existing and future problems. This results in the invention of a wide range of new features and concepts designed to give our players a positive playing experience. Anyone at Electronic Arts can be an inventor, and we often choose to patent inventions to show the world our amazing ideas, even if sometimes we don’t end up using them in game. 

We believe patents can drive innovation, not just at Electronic Arts but also across the industry. Every time we patent a technology or idea, we disclose technical information to the public that would otherwise never be publicly accessible. So do our competitors, and this know-how can serve as reference for others to further innovate. It can help incentivize others to come up with solutions, creating a cycle of innovation that we believe positively impacts our industry. 

Accessibility patent pledge

With this accessibility patent pledge, we are going further.  

We believe games should be accessible to everyone. Our internal teams have long been committed to breaking down barriers for our players. But to create meaningful change we need to work together as an industry. 

The accessibility patent pledge we launched today is intended to help inspire and encourage others to introduce pioneering and creative technologies. The pledge gives our competitors and all developers free access to our accessibility-centered patents to make their own video games more inclusive. It covers five accessibility-centered patents, but we’ll be adding more to the pledge as we continue to innovate in this space. At the same time, we’re also open sourcing solutions that we believe will enable and advance more developments in this area via Electronic Arts · GitHub.

We’re the first in the industry to announce a patent pledge that prioritizes accessibility but we hope others will join us in sharing their patents. 

We’re proud of our patent program and are excited to see what’s more to come from our brilliant inventors.