Electronic Arts (EA) has been doing efforts for a long time, to enable gamers to use a single identity across game platforms, even if those platforms are operated by different companies. And the good news is that EA has finally made it! With this achievement, EA will be able to follow gamers wherever they want to play and still track their activity, which will eventually help EA target better marketing pitches at gamers as they play EA’s games.

“If a player buys an EA game, the company will be able to follow that player across platforms such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the iPhone, Facebook, and EA’s own Origin online gaming service”, said Rajat Taneja, the Chief Technology Officer at EA.

“Our strategic vision at EA is to create a single backend system so that we can truly embrace the secular trends in our industry that are creating massive growth for games. And we will be able to embrace all of the new business models that come with that,” he added.

The entire task of enabling unified identity took EA a team of 1,500 engineers and more than 18 months, along with a major investment made by EA chief executive John Riccitiello. The company promised the technology a year ago, and the single identity is the first step in a strategy to creating a unified platform across all of EA’s games and platforms.

“We realized this was a non-trivial problem and that many people had tried to do this for years. Everything we do is putting the consumer front and center. We rebuilt our backend infrastructure on a fundamental level. It’s all about entertainment, but we realize that the way consumers are interacting with entertainment is different. They consume in bite-size chunks throughout the day, on the console, on a PC at work, and on mobile,” Taneja said.

When we talk about unified identity, the trick is to separate “identifier” from “identity.” Gamers have their Facebook identities, their Google Gmail accounts, Microsoft Xbox Live gamertags, and other IDs, but gamers can self-identify themselves any way they want. Now, a player could log into Bejeweled on an iPhone, and EA would know that you are the same player that also plays Plants vs. Zombies on the PC.

Besides, a player can play on one platform and then move to another. On the new platform, the player can access the same game at the same point and continue playing.

“The process of unified identity is something we see often cropping up in cloud-based services,” says assistant editor Kyt Dotson who recently wrote about EA’s foray into Big Data and how that’s affected by ‘unified identity.’ “Often we call it ‘single-sign on’ such as using Google, Facebook, or some other identity platform on varied services–granted, in EA’s case, it’s simply just a customer of EA being able to access any EA with a single sign on (rather than varied 3rd parties across the Internet) but the benefit is the same.”

A major benefit of this unification process is the cost saving. This data unification will save EA about 50 percent on its data storage costs, which in turn will have material effect on costs for digital revenues and a positive effect on EA’s revenues.