EA wants 'open gaming platform'
Games are exploiting the increasing power of games consoles — Rival gaming systems should make way for a single open platform, a senior executive at Electronic Arts has said. — Gerhard Florin said incompatible consoles made life harder for developers and consumers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The open-platform call comes at a moment when EA is repositioning itself on several fronts at once. The company built its position as the world's biggest videogame maker on franchise sequels like Madden, and its chief executive spent July 2007 arguing publicly for a shift beyond that reliance with a call for more innovative games. In June it stood up an EA Casual Entertainment group under Kathy Vrabeck to reach families and new consumers, and in October it committed $860 million to acquire VG Holdings, parent of BioWare and Pandemic Studios — its largest deal in 25 years.
Gerhard Florin's argument ties those moves together: EA develops and ports titles across incompatible consoles, so fragmentation is a direct cost line for the largest multiplatform publisher, while Spore's slip from fiscal 08 into fiscal 09 shows how expensive simultaneous development has become. An open platform would let EA amortize that spend once instead of per console.
First-order effects
- For EA and other multiplatform publishers, a single open platform removes per-console porting and certification costs, letting development budgets scale across every player rather than being duplicated for each machine.
- For consumers, incompatible systems mean buying hardware twice to play a friend's game; Florin frames fragmentation as a barrier to exactly the new, casual audiences EA's Vrabeck-led division was created to reach.
Second-order effects
- Console makers whose business rests on exclusive content and locked ecosystems would see their leverage eroded if publishers threw weight behind interoperability — exclusivity is what justifies hardware margins and licensing fees.
- Rival publishers face a fork: back the open-platform push and cut their own porting costs, or defend the closed model that keeps platform-holder marketing dollars and shelf placement flowing.
Third-order effects
- If publisher pressure holds, the industry's center of gravity shifts from selling locked boxes toward whoever controls distribution and services on shared hardware — moving the moat from the console to the storefront and network layer.
- A fragmented-to-open transition would also lower the barrier for non-traditional entrants, since reaching gamers no longer requires negotiating separate access to each walled garden.
The trend: Publisher economics are pulling the console business away from closed, incompatible platforms toward interoperable ones, with the largest multiplayer publishers — EA foremost — supplying the pressure.