Moore: Games marketing must move on

EA Sports president Peter Moore has warned the publishing community against using traditional logic when marketing their games – which he believes offers too little, too late to succeed.

Discussing EA Sports’ turnaround since he joined the label two years ago, Moore said that publishers were still making major mistakes in the way they promoted their games.

He added that the firm was now marketing its games earlier, whilst allowing its community to interact with studios for the first time in its history.

We needed to get away from the [secretive] black art – the ‘dark science’ days of making games, when we’d just lob the consumer a screenshot on the odd afternoon” he said.

It wasn’t enough. If you’re not talking [to your customers] every hour of every day, you’re not talking.”

Speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Moore said that he was constantly monitoring Google Analytics to see how often EA Sports was discussed online, as well as reading reports from Nielsen Media Research each afternoon to measure the effectiveness of the label’s year-round strategy.

If you’re not doing these things, you’re failing,” he said. You can’t market your way back a few weeks from launch. You need people talking about your games all year round.

These days, you can see if consumers are talking about you on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.”

Moore revealed that EA Sports developers use cameras to share work pics with the firm’s gaming community, and said that having his own official EA blog had helped break down barriers” with consumers.

I had to be thick skinned: I got called ‘ugly’ – but I knew that already,” he joked. Now, we’re never not interacting with our community.”