Electronic Arts quietly published a blog post on Medium today which reads like a pitch to game developers for a new online game development platform called Project Atlas.
There's a lot of exposition and detail in the full blog post (attributed to EA CTO Ken Moss) that's worth reading in full, but the upfront takeaway for game devs seems to be that EA has over 1,000 people working to unite its disparate game tech (the Frostbite engine, etc.) into Atlas, a unified hub for building and running games.
"Right now, developers have to spend a lot of time making fragmented services work together," reads the post. "Time and resources that could have been spent on creating new game play, concepts, story, or characters. We’re solving for some of the manually intensive demands by bringing together AI capabilities in an engine and cloud-enabled services at scale. With an integrated platform that delivers consistency and seamless delivery from the game, game makers will free up time, brain space, and energy for the creative pursuit."
It's an intriguing idea, albeit one that stretches across well-worn territory. For example, EA claims that Project Atlas will encompass the option to tap remote servers for additional processing power, which sounds quite similar to how Microsoft originally pitched Crackdown 3 years ago.
"With Project Atlas, which is cloud native, we’ll have the ability to break from the limitations of individual systems," the post continues. "Previously, any simulation or rendering of in-game action were either limited to the processing performance of the player’s console or PC, or to a single server that interacted with your system. By harnessing the power of the cloud, players can tap into a network of many servers, dedicated to computing complex tasks, working in tandem with their own devices, to deliver things like hyper-realistic destruction within new HD games, that is virtually indistinguishable from real life—we’re working to deploy that level of gaming immersion on every device."
No date has yet been announced for the launch of Project Atlas, though interested developers can find a lot more information (and a link to a hiring page) in the full blog post.