EA wants to take things slow with virtual reality gaming

Whereas most companies have been racing to dive into the emerging virtual reality gaming market, Electronic Arts wants to take a slower, more cautious approach. While the company isn’t denying that virtual reality will have a significant part to play in the future of gaming, CFO Blake Jorgensen believes it’ll be a few years before virtual reality grows and matures to the point where it’ll be worth it for Electronic Arts to start investing in that kind of content.

Electronic Arts’ chief financial officer has suggested that the publisher is showing caution when it comes to virtual reality, citing user numbers. “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 Blake Jorgensen during the UBS Global Technology Conference. “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.” Ubisoft, by comparison, has been more publicly enthusiastic about VR, telling investors it was “bullish about the potential” of the medium and working on a number of virtual reality projects. EA, it seems, doesn’t see that potential maturing for another five years.