EA cautious about making games for virtual reality

EA is planning to wait and see how well VR performs before it jumps into the virtual reality market.

Speaking at UBS Global Technology Conference – as reported by GI.Biz – EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the publisher is going to hold off until the VR market reaches a certain size before it starts developing and releasing games for it.

Jorgensen compares the initially small VR user base to that of the Wii, Wii U and PlayStation Vita, saying that EA no longer supports those platforms due to the small markets they represent.

"There’s some challenges still and I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market. We don’t make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough, the PS Vita – the Sony product – we don’t make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it’s all about the size of the market," said Jorgensen.

"As one of the largest software producers we have all of the manufacturers of equipment coming to us to try to sell us on their equipment and giving us development kits to try to build software for it. So we’ll build software for various ones but we’ll really wait and see how big the market is going to be."

He continued: I think the reality is, the next one to three years, it’s probably going to take some time to build up a sizable market place and you might see alternative uses for virtual reality first before it becomes gaming.”

"Longer term, five plus years away, I think there’s certainly a market there and it will be another exciting way to enjoy gaming."