Electronic Arts (EA) is reportedly preparing to roll out a service that will enable gamers to employ a single user identity across multiple platforms.
Essentially, this means that if a player buys an EA game, the company will be able to follow that player across platforms such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the iPhone, Facebook, and EA’s own Origin online gaming service.
“Our strategic vision at EA is to create a single backend system so that we can truly embrace the secular trends in our industry that are creating massive growth for games,” EA’s Rajat Taneja told VentureBeat.
“And we will be able to embrace all of the new business models that come with that.”
According to Taneja, the single identity program will allow players to easily find friends and start multiplayer games across platforms.
“We realized this was a non-trivial problem and that many people had tried to do this for years. Everything we do is putting the consumer front and center,” he explained.
“We rebuilt our backend infrastructure on a fundamental level. It’s all about entertainment, but we realize that the way consumers are interacting with entertainment is different. They consume in bite-size chunks throughout the day, on the console, on a PC at work, and on mobile. [So] we built the glue in the backend to connect the gamer across platforms.”
Taneja also confirmed the single identity platform supports a persistent state, meaning, a player can play on one platform and then move to another, resuming where he or she left off.
“All of our games will enable types of experiences that are congruent and consistent on the PC, consoles, smartphones, and tablets… We have a complete re-architecture of our data systems that gives us a single view of the data,” he added.
