Among a sea of horrendous PC ports this year, EA's games stand out for their relative quality on PC. Battlefield 1, for example, delivers outstanding visual quality but runs surprisingly well across a range of PC hardware.
The reason for this is EA develops its games for high-end PCs, then scales the graphics level to meet the hardware requirements of today's consoles. In a sense, EA ports games from PC to console, and that leaves gamers with the best experience on both platforms. EA's Blake Jorgensen had this to say on the matter at the UBS Global Technology Conference:
We build all of our games to the highest possible spec, which is typically a high-powered PC, and as the consoles come in, [which] may not be the highest spec, we may actually dummy down the console product to meet the spec of the console. In a world where the console looks more and more like a PC, that's good for us.
Jorgensen's last point is important in the modern gaming ecosystem. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are built using x86 hardware, which has long been the dominant hardware platform for PCs, and this makes it easier to develop games for consoles and PCs. Judging by EA's successes in game optimization, developing for PC first seems to be the right approach.
EA has also streamlined the game development process by moving most of their key game franchises to the Frostbite engine. Whenever new hardware is released, such as the PlayStation 4 Pro, it then becomes much easier to update this single engine and its development tools to support the new console. This is keeping EA prepared as Sony and Microsoft move to more frequent console hardware upgrades.