Electronic Arts'

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

 European Integration Studio is based in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

, Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 and is the company's largest specialized studio for videogame internationalization and localization

Internationalization and localization

In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market...

. When the studio opened it doubled the total number of workers devoted to developing entertainment software in Spain. According to a website devoted to attract foreign investments

Investment

Investment has different meanings in finance and economics. Finance investment is putting money into something with the expectation of gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for the principal amount, as well as security of return, within an expected period of time...

 in Spain "EA’s workforce of more than 400 people from more than 15 countries are proof of its commitment to turning the center into Spain’s main incubator of videogame talent".

EIS structure

The studio is split up between four different departments;

• Production -- A team of game producer
  Game producer
  A video game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a video game.The earliest documented use of the term producer in games was by Trip Hawkins, who established the position when he founded Electronic Arts in 1982...
  
  s responsible for managing all of the studio's projects.
• Engineering
  Engineering
  Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
  
  -- A team of engineers responsible for software pipelines
  Pipeline (software)
  In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements , arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next. Usually some amount of buffering is provided between consecutive elements...
  
  , animation
  Animation
  Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
  
   tools, audio engineering and development & support of internal tools. This department is split up in different specialized teams.

ESSC - European Shared Service Center:

• Localization testing
  Localization testing
  Localization testing is a part of software testing process focused on internationalization and localization aspects of software. Localization is the process of adapting a globalized application to a particular culture/locale...
  
  -- Covers testing of all the localized versions of EA's titles.
• European Compliance Group -- Focussed on game compliancy with first parties (Microsoft
  Microsoft
  Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
  
  , Sony Computer Entertainment
  Sony Computer Entertainment
  Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. is a major video game company specializing in a variety of areas in the video game industry, and is a wholly owned subsidiary and part of the Consumer Products & Services Group of Sony...
  
   and Nintendo
  Nintendo
  is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel....
  
  ). It is split up in different specialized groups (gameplay, compliance, consumer quality control etc.).

The studio also hosts EA Spain's sales and marketing department.

EIS development strategy

The European Integration Studio's main task is to provide services to the other EA studio's. A large part of the internal workforce is assigned to creating versions of EA games that are adapted to local market needs, which are created in collaboration with EA's other studio's in the rest of the world. The studio also develops a wide range of internal tools that are used and shared between other EA studio's.

Originally the studio was split up between two different buildings in Madrid, but in the first half of 2007 EA moved staff from both studio's to one central location in the North-east of Madrid, creating a single studio that now has over 400 full-time employees.