Are you worried that FIFA Online could cannibalise FIFA’s core audience – not necessarily on 360 and PS3, but primarily on PC?
Absolutely. We worry about that all the time; you have to have that fine balance. We're trying to find a consumer that isn’t home every night and doesn’t have the two hours to play a full game online. We’re seeing that with Tiger Woods Online - we did a lot of telemetry in the beta and 67 per cent of players were lapsed gamers, these are guy golfers in their mid 40s.
They used to have the time to play maybe on a PS2, but haven’t played a Tiger since 06. These are the guys we want to bring back – and we don’t want price, tech or location to be a barrier. We’re hoping the 350 million self-declared hardcore soccer fans (ten to 15 million of which play FIFA) will do the same thing. There will be a little bit of cannibalisation, but the upside of bringing new people in is worth the risk.
FIFA Online
Do digital distribution and subscription models open the way for games based on sports that have smaller audiences?
In North America, lacrosse looks to be the next sport that seems to always surface. Why can’t we do a lacrosse game? Is there an EA Sports portal where you can get the normal games that have enough scale, like American football and soccer, that we can generate a game experience for just about every platform, whether it’s for next-gen, iPads, iPhones, PC or browser based? Then there are sports like rugby and cricket – in particular for the Indian market – where it would be very difficult for us to justify putting a full-blown next-gen team on with all the associated costs.
Can we do a browser based version? So I think the answer's yes, but we’re not there yet. Digitise that content and provide experience for - and I don’t want to call them lesser sports - but regional sports that find it difficult to scale. Codemasters were fortunate that it was such a great Ashes series last summer, but their game sold for five weeks then it died. That’s difficult.
Codemaster's Ashes Cricket 2009
So you're looking to build a platform of sorts on which multiple experiences can be supported?
It’s typically the upfront cost of the engine. I think we probably have a PS3 engine somewhere around here that is not good enough anymore – so you have to invest in a whole new engine. And rugby’s complicated, there’s so much stuff in rucks and scrums, so many bodies - we’d have to spend a lot of money on an engine to get it to our standards.
But there’ll come a time when we will make that plunge again, figure out what we can do to serve that sport's fans who continues to look to us for that. It doesn’t look like any other company is stepping in to fill the void – Codemasters came in with cricket, and again I think they were lucky - it was a good game, but they were lucky it was a good Ashes otherwise if it had gone downhill quickly that game might have only sold for two weeks and they’d have lost money on that.