During Gamelab Barcelona 2018, Daryl Holt, the Vice President and COO of EA Sports, revealed that a brand new EA Sports division has been established in Madrid, Spain. According to EA, this new studio will work on their annual NBA Live series with EA Tiburon.

This new division will create 24 new jobs, but will technically be built upon EA's pre-existing operations in the Spanish capital. Daryl Holt later spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about the matter, stating that there is a lot of both pre-existing and young talent in Spain, so EA is eager to expand there:

"We met with the universities and they have a nice set of programs to develop young talent, there's experienced game developers here, there seem to be a lack of jobs necessary in the industry to keep them here and to continue to grow."

He was then questioned about why EA Sports is deciding to spread the development of the NBA Live series across two different continents. After pointing out that the company's popular FIFA series is developed by three different studios, he talked about how "distributed development" has changed in recent years:

"The advantage is that the way game development has changed is that it doesn't have to all be in one location. Distributed development back in the day used to be about how you were outsourcing, but distributed development today -- especially in a live service role -- is about how you're making games and not everyone has to be in the same location."

For those of you who are curious about what's next for the NBA Live series, NBA Live 19 was announced during EA Play 2018. This entry will feature basketball courts from around the world and new Real Player Motion technology, and its cover star is Joel Embiid from the Philadelphia 76ers. NBA Live 19 will hit PS4 and Xbox One on September 7.