Microsoft Corp. and the world's largest video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc., put aside long-standing differences over online gaming on Monday as EA said it would release more than a dozen games this year supporting Microsoft's Xbox Live.
After working only with games console leader Sony Corp in online gaming for the last year, EA said virtually its entire line-up of market-leading sports games would now support Xbox Live, along with other titles.
The agreement, announced at the start of the E3 games trade show, comes on the heels of rising sales for the Xbox, a distant second in the global console market to Sony's PlayStation 2.
Helped by lower pricing and exclusive games, the Xbox was expected to have outsold the PlayStation in April for the first time ever.
EA had consistently refused to support the Xbox Live service introduced in November 2002, citing concerns about the business model. Microsoft collects a subscription fee for Xbox users to access the online versions of its games, and at first required all Live-compatible games to go through its servers. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
But a change that allowed publishers to operate their own servers helped the two sides to come together, Microsoft said.
"The bigger thing that has changed is that we understand the issue better from each other's perspective," Robbie Bach, Microsoft's chief Xbox officer, told Reuters before the event.
"On both parts, I think there was a lot of religion expressed early on that we didn't understand very well, but when we understood that better it came down to some practical things."
Last year at E3, EA said it would support online play for console sports games exclusively on PlayStation for the coming year, and EA said it intends to continue to support Sony's hardware.
The agreement with Microsoft was seen as likely for weeks, after Microsoft decided to cancel most of its sports games for the current year. However, Bach denied that the cancellation was a condition to or a precursor of the deal. EA's sports games outsell their competitors by a wide margin.
EA showed its support for Microsoft at an E3 press conference by trotting out star athletes representing all of its major franchises, with boxing legend Muhammad Ali receiving a raucous standing ovation from the audience.
Other XBox Live titles announced by EA included "Need for Speed Underground" and a console version of the successful "Battlefield" series.
Among other games Microsoft presented at the Shrine Auditorium, the company set Nov. 9 as the release date for "Halo 2," a sequel to the most popular XBox game ever.
It also highlighted the long-awaited action game "Doom III," role-playing game "Fable", military adventure "Full Spectrum Warrior" and online fighting game "Dead or Alive Ultimate."
The company did not focus, though, on the next generation of its hardware. Some had speculated going into the show that Microsoft would offer details on "Xenon," the next generation of the Xbox, widely expected to be released in late 2005.
"It would be premature to start talking about hardware. We're really going to focus on what we think will make the difference with the next generation and that's going to be software," Moore said.