EA Sports will be moving to the cloud with the release of their sports titles later this year. In an effort to provide a more seamless experience, persistent player profiles are coming.

According to a number of sources, the move will benefit players by being able to take into consideration the games in the series that have been previously played. For example, if you purchased NHL 11 and played a lot of it, when you purchase NHL 12 you will be rewarded for what you accomplished in NHL 11 and you will not start from scratch in NHL 12.

This isn’t the first time that we have seen developers dabbling in this concept. The tracking will be platform agnostic, meaning that no matter what platform you play on, the data for that game series is tracked and kept in your profile in the cloud. Of course, this does allow EA to track how you play the games in their sports franchises, but at the same time it also allows them to reward you for playing multiple games in the EA Sports product line.

We also suspect that EA will mine this profile data and use it to enhance and improve their titles. For example, they might be able to determine that a specific feature isn’t connecting with players and they are not accessing it, or perhaps areas of the game are too easy or too hard. It would also be beneficial to the players, because the developer can provide a much more personal and customized experience, depending on the player.

We suspect that moving forward this will be the direction that EA will be heading with all of their titles; it is a no brainer to do it for the sports games first.