With FIFA now shadowing PES and the MotionPlus-enabled EA Sports Active waiting in the tunnel to take on the new audiences Wii Fit has carved out for its host console, Peter Moore has a lot to be proud of from his nearly two year tenure as president of EA Sports. We met with him at a recent event at Arsenal Football Club’s Emirates Stadium to talk about his plans for EA Sports’ future. Broadening his division’s reach into the female market with EA Sports Active, a move which he admits has been uncomfortable for a group used almost exclusively to talking to males, is one important part, and online is another. He claims that EA Sports titles have generated 500 million online gaming sessions since June 2008, and his division is increasingly experimenting with downloadable games.

How do you intend to drive 500 million connected game sessions this year to a billion next year?
There are 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’s 10vs10 was an interesting experiment and that clearly drove a lot of traffic.

Our other sports have got full-sided [games] now, like 5vs5 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, FIFA 09’s Ultimate Team being applied to other sports because any team sport can play in that game mechanic.

FIFA 09's Ultimate Team addon

[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.

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 to 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 – what’s Wii’s place in EA Sports?
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 EA Sports Active can replicate Wii Fit’s sales numbers?
I certainly think that from the pre-order indications there’s a tremendous bullishness from retailers around the world [who] have seen 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 US$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 you 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 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.