EA DICE is currently seeking applicants for a “small and collaborative VR team” in Stockholm, Sweden, suggesting that the studio will upgrade its popular Frostbite engine with support for virtual reality headsets.
Recent EA DICE job postings are on the lookout for a qualified creative director, senior technical artist, senior software engineer, senior gameplay engineer, and senior rendering engineer who have experience within the field of virtual reality.
“We have a small multi-disciplined team with Frostbite who will work on virtual reality projects and for that team we are now looking for a creative director,” one job description reads. “When it comes to your creative and technical skills we want to see a proven track record of developing and shipping AAA games. We think that you have been credited with developing one or many prominent features during your career and that you have experience from or are interested in adding the virtual reality piece to that.”
EA DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine powers many Electronic Arts games published over the last several years, including Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. The Frostbite 3 engine was most recently featured in the multiplatform competitive shooter Star Wars Battlefront.
Frostbite 3 has also played a key role in the development of multiple entries in EA’s Need for Speed series. The engine additionally powers upcoming games like Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and Mass Effect: Andromeda. It’s currently unknown whether these upcoming releases will feature VR support at launch.
Previously, Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen regarded VR with cautious optimism, stating during the UBS Global Technology Conference that EA will “see how big the market is going to be.”
“There’s some challenges still and I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market,” Jorgensen said. “We don’t make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough, the PS Vita — the Sony product — we don’t make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it’s all about the size of the market.”