Electronic Arts or EA has its head high up seeing that it wants to get in on the cloud. Yes, in a recent report, EA has announced that it is working on a new cloud gaming development platform titled “Project Atlas.”
According to a piece that Medium has up that gamesindustry.biz covered, we learn that the CTO at EA, Ken Moss, claims the publisher has a team of 1,000 heads dedicated to the service.
If you are wondering how this works, contrary to the current setups (like consoles and PCs) where a game runs on a generational piece of hardware, Project Atlas will attempt to give developers the ability to build titles on a cloud server, which in this case would be “Project Atlas.”
The CTO, Moss, called Project Atlas a “unified” platform that will “seamlessly combine” Frostbite (the engine behind Battlefield, FIFA, and Mass Effect: Andromeda) with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to help in the long run. The goal behind this is to create “living, breathing worlds that constantly evolve” based on “inputs from other players, AI, and even the real world.”
In laymen terms, AI algorithms will generate a safe space that can change at a snap of a finger for the easily offended while generating easy money for EA in an environment that will likely ditch mods for paid MTX on a buggy server.
In addition to the above, folks who participate in Project Atlas will have to download/install a “thin client” that will likely be glitchy given that it’s coming from EA. From here you’ll have to hope that their “lowest possible latency” won’t give out while you’re playing:
“When we talk about cloud gaming, we’re referring to a game that resides on an EA server rather than on the gamer’s PC or mobile device. The gamer enters the game by installing a thin client that can access EA’s servers where the games are running. We’ve been developing software that utilizes the cloud to remotely process and stream blockbuster, multiplayer HD games with the lowest possible latency, and also to unlock even more possibilities for dynamic social and cross-platform play.”
In other words, EA is pulling a card from the Goodfellas retorting to all future customers “F*ck you, pay me!”
Anyway, EA hasn’t revealed a launch date yet, but they do have a job opening page for the upcoming tech.