A couple of days ago, Electronic Arts CTO Ken Moss published a blog post announcing Project Atlas, a cloud-based game development platform that aims to merge EA’s various pieces of game-dev technology, such as its Frostbite engine and online game services, into a “next-generation unified platform.” According to the post, one of the main goals of Project Atlas is to cut down on the amount of time that developers have to spend on “manual configuration, integration, logging, and coding,” allowing them to “free up time, brainspace, and energy for the creative pursuit.”
Right now, Project Atlas is still under ongoing development, so there’s no telling yet what kind of an impact it will have, particularly in the MMO space. As Gamasutra points out in its article on Project Atlas, “It’s an intriguing idea, albeit one that stretches across well-worn territory,” as EA’s assertion that “Project Atlas will encompass the option to tap remote servers for additional processing power . . . sounds quite similar to how Microsoft originally pitched Crackdown 3 years ago.” Nevertheless, EA clearly has high hopes for the platform, and we’ll just have to wait and see what comes of it.
