EA CEO Andrew Wilson has taken the time to praise Pokemon GO, in a thinly veiled attempt to let us know that the publisher is doing Augmented Reality stuff too.
Wilson believes that what Niantic Labs has done with Pokemon GO is pretty damn cool, and that the game’s success has ‘energized’ EA to continue their work with AR.
Wilson said:
As you can imagine, we are energized by the success of Pokemon GO. We have tremendously strong brands that are unbelievably social in nature where we believe that participation at the community level through AR will heighten that experience. We’ve been working on some things for some time and will continue to work on those, and we’ll be ready to launch them at a time where we think we can better engage communities through AR.
Translation: ‘We’ve seen that you can make a fuck ton of money out of this shit, and now we want a slice of the pie.’
EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen added that Pokemon GO has enticed a ton of first time or relatively casual gamers, but revealed that EA hasn’t seen any lost revenue from its own mobile games since GO was released.
As much as the world wants to love Pokemon GO, Niantic is currently fighting some pretty bad press.
The majority of this stems from the fact that they’ve entirely removed the broken tracking feature from their game rather than fix it, and then took down all external tracking services that were created to help players.
If EA really do get in on the AR mobile market, I want to see Mirror’s Edge GO first. Then we can sit back and watch natural selection do its thing.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.