Mark your calendars: EA Games’ big open-world title is coming in 2020

If you don’t count EA Games as the biggest publishing house in the world, it’s certainly up there with the other monsters of the industry like Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft and similar. But despite being such an enormous company with huge yearly turnovers and hundreds of titles on its books, EA doesn’t actually have a massive, open-world action game. It’s working on it, though.

Just don’t expect it to arrive any time soon. Despite the publisher confirming that it is indeed developing its own big, open-world game, in a similar vein to Assassin’s Creed, we shouldn’t expect it to release until the 2020 fiscal year or even 2021.

The developer said to already be working on the game — though presumably in the very early stages — is Motive Studios, a very young developer that was founded by Jade Raymond, who worked as a producer on Assassin’s Creed at Ubisoft in the past. Motive is a subsidiary of EA and is thought to be working on an unnamed Star Wars game, though it seems unlikely that would be the big, open-world game EA has been talking about.

Related: EA gives up on trademarking “Ghost” video game

Indeed, there were hints earlier this year that EA wanted to build a new, monster IP that it would own entirely. Presumably, though, if it’s a success, that IP will see a lot of different titles based around it (thanks GameSpot).

As EA has said, the action genre is perhaps the most lucrative in all of gaming.

What makes it such a surprise is that EA doesn’t have much of a presence in it. While being the most popular, however, it’s also very saturated. EA has a near-monopoly on sports titles and has managed to corner several other important sections of the industry. If it can dominate in the action space, too, it would be hard not to call it the biggest publisher out there right now.

What kind of game would you like to see come out of this EA development?