New Need for Speed hits this fall, new Plants vs. Zombies in early 2016 (update)

Electronic Arts will publish a new Need for Speed title and a new Plants vs. Zombies game within the next 11 months, the company announced today.

Neither game has a specific name or release date at this point. But according to a slide presentation detailing EA's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for its 2015 fiscal year, the next Need for Speed game will be released during the third quarter of EA's 2016 fiscal year, while a new Plants vs. Zombies title will launch during the fourth quarter. EA's third quarter runs from October through December 2015, and the fourth quarter goes from January through March 2016.

EA announced a year ago, during the earnings call for its 2014 fiscal year, that it would not release a Need for Speed game in 2014. Instead, Ghost Games — the studio behind the most recent entry in the franchise, 2013's Need for Speed Rivals — said it would bring back the series in 2015 with a "highly innovative" game.

The last Plants vs. Zombies title was PopCap Games' Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare (screenshot above), a multiplayer-focused third-person shooter that debuted in February 2014 on Xbox platforms and was later released on PlayStation consoles and Windows PC. EA's upcoming Plants vs. Zombies game will be joined in Q4 2016 by EA DICE's Mirror's Edge 2.

Update: EA's Need for Speed plans in 2015 include "a new console experience, and a new mobile game," said Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, during an investor call this afternoon. The slide presentation does mention a mobile game called Need for Speed: No Limits, made by Real Racing developer Firemonkeys, which EA is currently testing in Taiwan and the Netherlands prior to a worldwide release planned for later this year.

Wilson added that the upcoming Plants vs. Zombies game will be a "bigger and bolder new console experience," and that EA will reveal "more at E3."