Patrick Soderlund, the executive vice president of EA Studios, has said the publisher is investing in new properties and is keen on expanding its portfolio with “gigantic action games.”

In an interview with IGN, Soderlund noted the action game genre is currently the most popular, dominated by franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and Grand Theft Auto. This, according to the exec, is an attractive space for EA to move into.

“If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don’t have a lot,” Soderlund said. “EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin’s Creed, Batman, GTA, or those types of games that are really big.

He continued: “The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn’t been done before.”

Asked whether this means EA plans to develop an open-world game, similar in scale to the titles he mentioned, Soderlund said he would “love to,” but didn’t commit.

“I’m not saying we’re going to go after GTA and sell 50 million units. We would love to, but what I’m saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do. And I think for us to do that we need the right people.

“You need a leadership and people that have done this in the best and they’ve done it successfully in the past. That, coupled with a large ambition to invest in new IP. We want to. We’re building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP.”

In July 2015, Jade Raymond, the co-creator of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise, founded a new EA studio called Motive. The studio’s first project is to work alongside Visceral Games on its Star Wars title.

Motive will also “work in close quarters with the BioWare team,” suggesting the studio may be contributing to the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda.