Last Friday we got the chance to catch up with EA Sports president Peter Moore at Arsenal Football Club’s Emirates Stadium. The sun was shining down over the pitch and we could have talked football with Moore all afternoon, or indeed about his past roles with Sega and Microsoft. But we were there to talk about EA Sports and the division’s plans going forward...
Peter, can you sum up EA Sports’ five pillar growth strategy for our readers?
We start with capture the core. That means having a focus on continuing to build quality games that keep our core consumer involved 365 days a year regardless of which franchise it is. And the metric by which we measure that is our Metacritic scores and making sure we’re delivering that level of quality. Certainly the series of games we’ve delivered in the past 12 months have lived up to that, so keeping our core consumer happy, content and buying our games obviously from a business point of view is important, but at the same time our industry is changing…
The growth in our industry is coming from outside if you will, with new consumers coming in, so captivating the masses is something that we need to do if we’re going to take part in the growth of the industry. Different game experiences like EA Sports Active, deploying the Wii MotionPlus in both golf and tennis as a way of a very easy entry to sports, pick up and play, we’ve always talked about that and I’m not sure we’ve delivered it until now. People were telling me on Wednesday that they walked right up to Grand Slam Tennis and within 15 seconds they were having a great time. And that’s got be the goal, and yet it’s not an easy game to master, which is the key.
Expansion of the brand is very important. Like any business today in the challenging macroeconomic times, you’ve got to look at how you can continue to invest in your brand and keep your revenues coming in so you can keep people employed. I’ve got 1,400 very talented people, we had a tough time at EA recently and we had to let 1,100 people go and we don’t want to do that again. So the obligation on me as a business leader is to find ways to continue to grow our business in new and unique ways, quite frankly at times outside of videogaming, so expanding our brand into places that are non-game related, either using our technology or the EA Sports brand itself, is important.
The globalisation of our business is very important. [In the US] EA Sports means [American] football today, it’ll mean hockey soon, it’ll mean basketball soon, it’ll mean collegiate football, it’s a broad portfolio of sports that are appealing to American sports fans. We don’t have as many sports outside the US - it’s football, right? - and we need to have different offerings here [in Europe] to get bigger growth. I see tennis as being one way of doing that. Certainly Tiger Woods, one of the world’s greatest athletes, is known the world over and golf is a truly global game. EA Sports Active - health, wellness and fitness plays anywhere in the world and that allows us to be able to look at opportunities, certainly in Europe, where our pre-order business on that title is strong, but we need to get more balance in our globalisation.
And finally digitisation. We’ve had a lot of interesting experiments over the last couple of months with digital downloads. Downloadable content that complements and enhances the game experience is important to us so we have tried just recently 3 On 3 NHL Arcade on Xbox Live Arcade, FIFA 09 Ultimate Team which is a runaway success right now for us having delivered it six months after we delivered the FIFA game itself. And then more recently in the US we delivered the NCAA Bracket, all 64 college basketball teams and the bracket itself. And you layer that with our announcement of 500 million connected game sessions… We started to see about five or six weeks ago that we were coming up on half a billion game sessions, which just took my breath away.
What kind of innovations in online features are we going to see from EA’s 2010 line up that drive half a billion connected game sessions this year to a billion next year?
There’s a lot of things we haven’t announced yet and it’s a little early on some things, but I think if you look back on the lessons we’ve learned, [FIFA] 10 versus 10 was an interesting experiment and that clearly drove a lot of traffic.
Our other sports have got full-sided [games] now, 5 versus 5 in basketball. The ability for us to be able to get full teams versus full teams is important for bringing more people in. While we haven’t necessarily announced a lot of online things because we keep them under wraps until we’re ready, you can imagine, for example, the Ultimate Team thing being applied to other sports because any team sport can play in that game mechanic.
“[With the PC platform] we’ve got to find the right business model for us going forward. We really want to keep sports an important part of the portfolio that’s available to PC gamers, but the business model right now, shipping a physical disc for the PC simply isn’t working for us. And along the context of making the right choices with our resources and making sure that we’re delivering a return on investment for valuable employee time, I’ve got to find innovative ways to bring our content to life on the PC and online is the way that that’s going to happen.
How seriously have you considered releasing a sports MMO?
We think about it all the time. We look at how we could bring an MMO type experience to sports or sports to an MMO experience. There’s a couple of people trying it on PC with, I guess, mixed results, I don’t know, it’s difficult to figure it out. We’re constantly looking at what would be a compelling experience of a classic MMO - most people talk about an MMORPG where you become the player.
Some of the challenges quite frankly are licensing approvals. Do you want it to be all sugary and nobody does anything wrong or gets into player disputes, and no player gets in trouble at a nightclub at night? If you want it to be that way I might get licence approval, but if you want it to be a bit more realistic then I might have a challenge getting licence approval. So I have t fight that fine line of making sure our partners feel comfortable with that content versus types of game experiences they don’t feel comfortable with.
EA Sports is releasing five titles specifically designed for Wii this year and making a big noise about it? Can you tell Edge a little more about your Wii strategy?
The numbers don’t lie and certainly you can’t ignore the Wii [installed base]. We have the challenge of how we bring our sports games to life in a meaningful way on the Wii. I think we’re doing well on the Wii [but] I think there’s still a great deal of opportunity to do better in our core games and to bring new games to life on the Wii.
I think we’re really hitting our stride now with our teams that have been focused on the Wii for the last two years. Probably EA Sports Active is a great example of how you can do something that brings the Wii to life in a very unique way. Grand Slam Tennis being time exclusive on the Wii and having that as the focus of our attention for the first iteration also shows our commitment to that. It also shows that tennis and golf in particular are very compatible sports with the Wii experience.
Do you think it’s possible to replicate the Wii Fit phenomenon and sales numbers with EA Sports Active?
I certainly think that from the pre-order indications… that there’s a tremendous bullishness from retailers around the world [who] have seen the game and been presented with the game, and when we explain to them our marketing plan which is very extensive and about two weeks away from kicking in.
Wii Fit has proven that there’s a market out there for that type of experience. I think we have a different experience and we see it as very complimentary. I think there are five exercises in there that are compatible with the Wii Fit board but you don’t need one. So we are very excited, as well as being uncomfortable. To be very clear it’s not something we have done before and we don’t talk to girls very well. Whilst maybe our regular core games have about 15 percent of female purchase and use, maybe a little higher, and while we expect men to use EA Sports Active, it’s aimed at female consumers, say women in their 30s that don’t have time to go to the gym. We also think that, in the current economic times, having a personal trainer in a box that you can do in the comfort of your own home for the US equivalent of $60 is a very cost effective way of giving people a way to work out and stay in shape at home.
Sport’s a universal language, but which regions are EA Sports finding difficult to penetrate and which are ripe for pressing further into?
Well the Asian market as a whole, although it’s difficult to call Asia because you have Japan which is a different market, while Korea’s a very well developed market and different experiences need to go [into each]. I think we have huge upside in the Asian market. Quite frankly I look at what’s going on in Japan right now with FIFA versus Winning Eleven and I know we can do better and we need to apply ourselves better there.
You’d like to think Latin America. We do FIFA down there but it’s still not a developed market to where we’d like it. And then, like a lot of companies, you’ll look at India and Russia and China, which we’re getting into finally with some of our PC games and hopefully consoles will be soon to follow. But you look at Russia, which is finally getting developed and getting its capitalism organised so that now you have retail chains, and the upside in India is just phenomenal. Retail is starting to coalesce around shopping malls and you have global brands that have footprints in there so you’re getting a very developed, very large nation that you have to find ways to take advantage of.