MCV interviews Peter Moore at the EB EXPO

At the EB EXPO last weekend, MCV got a chance to speak to legendary COO of EA Peter Moore. Stay tuned, this is one part of a few...

How is the videogame landscape changing with the rise of smartphone and browser-based gaming as well as non-premium priced products, and how is EA's strategy chaning to reflect the new market?

I'd say we already changed our model about three or four years ago. When I first joined EA (and I'm never shy about telling this story), I flew out to New York for a presentation we called 'Burning Platform'.

The concept of a 'Burning Platform' is that there's a burning oil rig, you're on the high sea on the oil rig and you can either jump into the murky waters and face probably death or you can stay on the burning platform and face certain death.  

As a company, as dramatic as that sounds, we decided to jump into the murky waters. What that meant was investment in infrastructure, building out Nucleus, which is the backbone of what we do, the common EA identity which allows you to login with any device with your EA ID and we recognise you and we can support you better. It gives better service, gives us better telemetry, gives us (quite frankly) the ability to make the games people are playing better and tailor things more to you. You have one single login across all your EA games.  

We recognised then that the era of the simplicity of our industry was changing, and by that I mean that EA had had a tremendous run in particular on the PlayStation 2. We invested heavily, believed in the platform, worked tremendously well with Sony around the world and EA was really firing on all cylinders on a singular piece of hardware. But, we saw a future which is exactly what you've just painted, which is where, as devices become more ubiquitous, as the internet becomes more accessible (no matter where you are: from your car, to the sidewalk, to the subway, to your home) that fragmentation will occur. And as people come into the gaming market, disintermediation between the gamer and game developers was happening and it was as much about Apple, Facebook and Google (and even Amazon) as it was about Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

So, the investments we've made in the last four years since that, I think have really started to pay off. It's no coincidence that the two most exciting things that we’re talking about right now back at our corporate headquarters are The Sims Social, with 40million or so people playing, not all of whom play for free but it's a free game, and Battlefield 3: a game that has cost us tens of millions to develop, and is a full-priced and premium game.  

There's a bunch of stuff in the middle, but I think it's just important to recognise that how we make the appropriate investments covering the continuum of gaming from free and with a very simple front-game mechanic (which is what everybody's playing right now), all the way to a world-class shooter, and every stop in between.

How would you say EA is utilising these smaller, more ubiquitous platforms to complement the bigger titles? For example how does The Sims Social impact what EA is doing with The Sims 3?

Well... how about vice versa? I mean, I think these games can stand alone, but to your point they're also tremendous catalysts for The Sims franchise. There are 40 million as of last night (I haven't looked today) that have downloaded [The Sims Social], have created an avatar and are playing. That's in two months. Most brands would die for 40 million people within a two month period. So, a) as a standalone game, it's great. It's spreading this concept of bringing more and more people into gaming, (which we think is very good for the industry) and b) when we're ready (in the hopefully not too distant future) to talk about our next Sims experience, we're talking to a very large and addressable market.

I look at the democracy of the whole thing and say 'Look, you don't wanna pay? Fine.' Some people don't want to grind their way through a game but accelerate through, and that's fine also.

To register for the MCV Pacific News Digest, head to the registration page: http://www.mcvpacific.com/user/index/register/journey/register

Add a new comment