At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, EA CEO John Riccitiello stated that he think Battlefield 3 will be the game of the year. He said that EA lost the fps lead they once had with Medal Of Honor but with the change over to the ps3 they lost it, but now they want it back.

Here are some of the things he said at the Conference:

“There’s a great thing about an annual franchise, whether it’s us or our competition; when you’ve got that annual franchise it’s a meal ticket, it can generate a great deal of income.”

“One of the problems with an annual franchise is you don’t take the time to reengineer the underlying codebase so that it’s as ‘next-generation’ as it can be,” he added.”

“I’ve made no excuse for the reality that I want market leadership in the first-person shooter game business,” he said. “In many ways I feel that we created the first mass market first-person shooter with Medal of Honor and unfortunately with the transition to the PS3 era we lost that. We’re after it now.”

We don’t always take these kind of things too serious because we know that developers can be a bit biased towards there own game, but what we do take seriously is what he said in that EA want the market back. This is a very very good thing (yes I did mean to put very twice). This will mean EA, Treyarch (who made COD: BLOPS) and who ever will make MW3 (which at this moment in time seems to be every major developer in the world) will have to be at the top of there game because they will have a lot of competition. With the game’s being a yearly franchise things might be slow in development because they have to rush to get it out every year, but imagine what we will have in 2-3 years from now.

The new Battlefield will feature a 24 player multiplayer on console and a whopping 64 player multiplayer on PC. Battlefield is expected to be released later this year, the same time around COD which will be very interesting to see who sells the more amount of copies.