So after the game was released last year and was received very well, critically as well as commercially, what was the reaction internally? The reaction to the reaction.
Yeah, I always find it a little bit of an anticlimax. I’ll tell you a little bit about why, and it’s that we base a lot of stuff around Metacritic at EAC, and Metacritic takes like a month and a half before you really know what your score is. There’s not like one event where you go to and say, ‘right, Official PlayStation Magazine gave us ten out of ten’ and that’s the only score you’re ever going to look at, so you all go away and party because you got ten out of ten. You have to wait for a month and a half until everyone’s rated you – everyone’s really tired, I mean obviously everyone’s really happy with the score. I guess the other thing is your Metacritic starts high and slowly goes down. We were at 90 for a day, I think. I took a screenshot of Metacritic that day.

For me as well, and the guy that works with me on the gameplay, we play the game so much during development all we see is the things we didn’t get to fix. So we’re sitting there, and we’re really happy with the score and the sales and everything, but all you see when you play it is, ‘Oh, we never had time to fix that’. And no, actually, going back to play it now, I think ‘this game’s actually better than what I thought it was,’ because I’d projected so much bad stuff on it, the stuff I never got to fix. Obviously we’re really happy with it, but there’s not a lot of time to sit back and pat yourself on the back, because you’ve only got a year and you’ve got to put the new one out. And it’s an even bigger challenge now to improve on that score given where we are. I mean, we’ve seen Konami struggle to improve upon what they had. It’s going to be tough.

What about, if you’ll excuse the term, the long game: FIFA versus PES. FIFA was struggling when you arrived, but is there a sense now that you’ve got to where you want to be?
There is that recognition, the studio has recognised the whole team in a yearly award and things like that. People do understand the achievement we’ve had, but I don’t think you can speak to anyone in the studio who thinks, you know, we’re there, and let’s leave it there. The size of the gameplay team is maybe one person less than it was last year.

And that’s unusual?
The size of the team?

Yes: would EA normally establish the technology and then scale back?
And then maybe move them on to other projects, so we can use that time building up another franchise. I mean, the team must be... the team I had in 2007 was maybe five times bigger than the team I had on FIFA 07, so it’s a massive investment and we’re not letting up. You can’t speak to anyone in our studio who believes this is the end of the road. Maybe when we get to 90 [on Metacritic] it’ll be different, but I don’t think so. There’s always a strive for me. And the development team, all we get to see are the things we didn’t get to fix.

That delivery schedule must be punishing, though, when it’s combined with such a perfectionist attitude.
A little bit, I mean by the time the game’s released we are actually working on the next one. Finalling the game is a little bit of a hassle, because you spend a lot of energy not really doing an awful lot. Finalling is a large part of the process, the last couple of months are finalling, anyway. There are times during that when a lot of bugs are getting fixed and there’s a lot of fine tuning. Yeah, it is a little bit of a distraction, and the challenge is for everyone to recuperate and get back into the groove for the next iteration.

What’s the big aim for FIFA this year? Do you go in on day one with a list of things you think ‘these are the things which are going to keep us where we are on Metacritic, in sales terms, and as a game which we want to play ourselves’?
Realistically, we’re a business first and foremost. I’m a firm believer, and have been ever since I joined, that we have to work on the fundamentals every year, to keep the experience new, to iron out those problems, to make the game feel different.

But I also think other people look for different things in the game, in game modes and thing like that. I know the success we’ve have with the 10 vs 10 and Be A Player mode is something else we need to invest in, and try to see where that goes. The potential for that is really high, if we can captivate people in the way we need to. Last year’s version, it’s a nice experience but maybe not the most user-friendly thing to get into and to set up. There’s a lot we can do there. If it does pick up it could be huge, right? This idea of virtual football leagues and things like that.

Obviously we have to come up with these things that marketing can get behind, with a story for the game, like ‘why are you going to buy this game?’ So we do work on that, but we tend to work on that after we’ve thought about what we want to do with the game. Certainly for FIFA 11 we’re going to spend a lot more time thinking ‘How do we take this game to the next level?’ because it’s going to get a lot harder.