David Rutter is the producer of FIFA 09 on PS3 and  Xbox 360. Working out of the largest EA studio at EA Canada in Burnaby, BC, Rutter leads a global team comprised of individuals from 18 different countries, who speak 20 different languages, all united by a passion for football. He is a native of Stevenage, UK.


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We’ve had a phenomenal uptake of people playing FIFA ‘09 online this year. It’s taken a lot of us by surprise but the stats speak for themselves…

Between FIFA ’07 and FIFA ’08 we saw a unique user increase of 200%, but the difference this year is much, much higher. We had a ridiculous number of online games played over the first couple of weeks  - about 35 million in the first two weeks, on PS3 and Xbox 360 alone.

We had nearly a million players register over the first few weeks and around 300,000 players coming on every day. Anyone familiar with online gaming stats will recognize that those figures are phenomenal.

Just to be clear, that’s 35 million games of football, not just 35 million people playing. I mention that distinction because of this year’s 10 vs 10 mode which has changed the dynamic of online sports gaming, and the culture in so many ways.

For anyone not familiar, it allows any player to come on and play FIFA ‘09 as an individual member of a team, with nine other players (the goalkeeper is AI) against another team of individuals. If there are not enough players, AI will take over some of the roles.

Personal Experience

I think this mode is changing the way people play online games. We’re seeing people look at themselves differently as online players. The best teams have players who understand that they’ve got a role to fulfill, so people who are more defensive minded and don’t mind playing defense will be the best form of defender you can have and you’re going to have a much stronger team.

If you’re more random in the way you organize your team you’re going to get people who just race to get to the glamour positions and just play for themselves. Those teams that just create themselves in the moment don’t do so well, although it’s still a valuable and fun experience.

But a more-team-minded player leads to greater success online and a more fun experience. When you actually play against a well disciplined team it’s a lot harder to break them down.

For each person, it’s a different emotional context, being part of a large team rather than just some guy playing alone or in a very small group. If you play online as the whole team, you’re going full pelt for 90 minutes and there is lots of drama and stress but it’s on a straight line level.

However, playing as a team-player there are times when not much is happening – but when those moments arrive when you do come up to the ball or you’re needing to do a tackle or fire on goal or whatever, the emotional context becomes significantly more heightened.

That’s definitely what players are taking away from this; the added stress of being part of a team and really needing to perform not just to beat someone else, but to avoid letting down your team-mates or to do what’s right for a fairly large group of people.

I don’t think there’s anything more thrilling than having nine of your mates tell you you’ve done an excellent job and there’s nothing worse than having nine of your mates call you a moron.

Organising Online Teams

If you play in a sports team regularly, you’ll understand the principals about trying to get a team ethic. We’re actually asking people to found their own online clubs so you actually start a club and play in a league.

If you’re rubbish at organizing people and managing a club, then you’re not going to be able to get people to come online and play with you, whereas if you’re better at it then you’re going to have a successfully run club and you know you’re going to be able to score more points.

The whole point of the scoring system on FIFA online clubs is based on not just how well you play on the pitch but the number of people you can get to turn up to a game. So the more people you’ve got on your team the better you’ll be. The way we see this is that formalized well run clubs will then elevate up the leader boards more quickly than people who might not be so good at organizing or so well disciplined on the pitch.

On average there’s six players playing in club matches. And, actually, that fits in with our own club on the FIFA team. It depends on how busy the guys are with families and other commitments but it averages out at about six, which is also the general average for stable clubs.

We have seen the premium clubs, players who are extremely well disciplined, and it’s easy to imagine them having a virtual or a real currency attached to their value. We would be interested in pursuing that and I think there may be business opportunities for those clubs for real world sponsors to come in and sponsor them.

I also think that for the managers of these clubs there’s a natural kind of flick towards a more standard football management game genre where you actually are buying and selling players, virtual players at least, to manage your club and having contracts with people even if it’s not real money. It’s a natural evolution for this to go

Technical Challenges

Creating a place where 20 guys could play football against each other online took some serious work and lots and lots of testing here in the studio. I can’t tell you how many people were involved and how much money it costs. It was an immense effort.

And still we’re learning new things, because this is an expedition into unknown territory.

When you’re seeing many hundreds of thousands of people playing the game and millions of games being played online, you see things that you’d never have found in even an extended, well-funded testing environment.

But, as a studio, we’re moving towards a level of online service where we can make sure that everything gets sorted out very quickly and we’ve had very few complaints.

A key part of being a service is online updates. We have our standard player rosters that we update at the end of transfer windows. Currently they are real players from the professional leagues, so you can’t actually create a player in the truest sense and grow them in FIFA ’09 for online team play. That’s something that we do want to do in the future and then a persistence becomes part of the experience.

For FIFA ‘10 and onwards that’s where we’re going. I can’t commit to exact kind of features at the moment but that’s the vision of where we’re heading – allowing online players to play as part of a team but also interact with this sporting world as an individual with certain skills, reputation and achievements.