EA CEO on a next-gen future and a smoother console transition

Electronic Arts new CEO Andrew Wilson thinks that the transition to next-gen consoles was smoother than the last generational jump, which will allow developers to innovate more in the next few years.

Wilson responded to a question "what can be done with the new hardware" over the next five years at the Credit Suisse 2013 Annual Technology Conference. He first commented on the console transition, which he believes will free up development teams to work on new features.

"One of the nuances here is that this transition cycle — this console cycle — both Sony and Microsoft's platforms have simplified their architecture and simplified their toolsets," he said. "In the last transition, we spent the first two to three years actually just trying to figure out how to get the most out of the boxes, particularly because the two boxes were very different. The good news now is that I think that we have reached a level of quality at launch that we didn't get to last time, and our teams are already starting to think about investment in new innovations for the future."

Though Wilson declined to provide specifics about those new innovations as they applied to franchises like FIFA and Madden, he did imply that the connected nature of the consoles would play a major role in them.

"But what I would say is that engagement between you and your friends and engagement between you and the sport or you and the subject matter that you love through not just the graphical but though the online capabilities and the connection capabilities are going to fundamentally change with how you're going to interact with entertainment software in the future."

For more on the future of EA and its new CEO, be sure to check out a recent episode of Friends List in which Andrew Wilson answered questions from Polygon readers.