Electronic Arts announces key new publishing deals

Leading publisher Electronic Arts has announced a number of key new deals, with publishing agreements struck with developers Gas Powered Games and Castaway Entertainment, as well as a new European deal with Koei.

Gas Powered Games, which created epic RPG title Dungeon Siege for Microsoft, is working on a PC real-time strategy game for Electronic Arts, while new studio Castaway, founded by some of the core staff who worked on the Diablo games, is working on another PC title - this time an action RPG game.

Work is already underway on Castaway's game, while Gas Powered expects to have its strategy title ready for launch during 2006. Both companies, unsurprisingly, expressed delight at working with the industry's biggest player, with Gas Powered president Chris Taylor describing it as a "huge opportunity" and saying that the studio "couldn't be happier", while Castaway president Michael Scandizzo reflected that EA's support would ensure that their game would be "a creative, addictive and genre-defining title."

Meanwhile, EA Partners has scooped another European publishing agreement for the company, this time signing up Koei's PS2 title Samurai Warriors for distribution in Europe, with a launch scheduled for June. Samurai Warriors has recently been a major hit in Japan, where it was released last month under the title Sengoku Musou.

EA Partners has been successful in signing up a large number of key titles for European publication recently, and the publisher's influence in the market here has been expanded significantly by virtue of being behind games such as Namco's Soul Calibur II and Square Enix' Final Fantasy X-2.