Xbox World 360 caught up with EA Sports boss Peter Moore in thier latest issue, on shelves now. Here's what he had to say...
EA Freestyle is a new brand targeting the casual gamer. Sounds like Nintendo's Marketing strategy...
Moore: Time is being compressed and people have less time to play games, so we have to create game experiences that are catered to them. We're not dumbing down the experience; segmentation such as Freestyle allows us freedom to explore outside of the core EA Sports brand. 'It's In The Game' is still about testosterone and competing against each other, which is what we're good at, but that business is not going to grow as quickly as the market for new consumers coming in.
How does EA Big fit into this picture?
Moore: EA Big will go away. It will eventually disappear and it's actually had a longer shelf life in Europe than it has over here. Big as a label is a little restricted. It's action sports, it's extreme sports - you think of SSX and the Street games. We needed a broader platform to go forward.
So, is 'casual' the way forward?
Moore: Well, look at Rock Band. It really came home for me when we were in Munich for our global marketing meeting and we took over the Hard Rock Café for the night and had a Rock Band competition. There were a hundred of us and it was like a real rock concert. It was a blast. I stood back and I thought that this was an incredible cultural phenomenon. The crowd were going wild, but all we were doing was playing on toy guitars, toy drums and singing badly into a microphone. Now the beer might have had something to do with it, I don't know, but it was a great social thing. And I said, "Boy, this product is going to change the way we think about games."
Do you think there's any crossover between the core and casual markets?
Moore: What I love about where we are at the moment is that the three gaming platforms are three distinctive experiences. Nintendo are trying to get people off the couch and you play more intuitively so you have brand new consumers there. Microsoft continues to do well with Xbox Live, but it's still a little too hardcore for where they would like to be at this point. That was something we tried to change when I was there.
What about DLC? will that replace yearly updates?
Moore: The criticism that we get is that we just update stuff each year. We do a lot more than that. I think of DLC in terms of a sports season - I mean, who would have thought it would be Portsmouth and Cardiff in the FA Cup Final? If you play FIFA, maybe the game could recognise that. We update the game every few weeks based on what we think is going on, but we should be looking to update the game every day. Wouldn't it be cool if the game the next day you play it reflects what happened the night before?
There's an opportunity for us, and it's difficult at the moment, but there are games in the future that will take a ton of data every time a real game is played, analyse that data, and then drop it down into the videogame. So, say somebody gets injured, and they're out for eight weeks - then they're out for eight weeks in the game. There would be this real-time feeling we're trying to get in our games; that you're not restricted to the code on the disc. The game updates in real time and makes you think you're getting inside of the game. In my opinion, that is the future.
But we imagine the twelve month turn-around restricts things a little...
Moore: We've got to go after more rapid development - I call it 'sell fast, sell cheap.' We need to generate ideas we can try out quickly and cheaply, and say either 'Yes it works, let's continue to invest,' or 'It doesn't, let's walk away'. In our world we only have a year to deliver a game.
This is not GTA, this is not Halo, this is not Metal Gear... This is NBA, Madden and FIFA and the season doesn't wait for us to get through Beta before they start kicking a ball. It's our job to be in sync with the start of the season.
What's all this about daily update DLC so that players who are really injured are ruled out for online game squads in real-time? Where's the "fun" in that?
Where's the "fun" in booting FIFA, Madden, NBA, etc, only to find out your game needs to download another daily update? How about when the update is finished and you find out your favourite team's squad is crippled? Is this fun?
Who wants to spend time every single day rearranging their squad - instead of playing football / basketball?
Bearded man, let your software developers come up with the ideas. Retire your product managers. You don't know what you're doing.
"sell fast, sell cheap". Great - in theory. In practice what you have there is a full-price product every year. That's not helping the whole 'evil mega-corporation' image at all.
I'd even accept yearly updates if they actually added noticeable new features. We've been promised decent updates for NBA Live 09 and FIFA 09. Let's see how that works.
Failing that, I'm on the side of everyone else here.
Do you think there's any crossover between the core and casual markets?
Moore: What I love about where we are at the moment is that the three gaming platforms are three distinctive experiences. Nintendo are trying to get people off the couch and you play more intuitively so you have brand new consumers there. Microsoft continues to do well with Xbox Live, but it's still a little too hardcore for where they would like to be at this point. That was something we tried to change when I was there.
Two points:
1) You may have tried to change Live but you haven't. The Live ranking system is still out of whack meaning that you're constantly demolished by superior players and most lobbies are still full of purile achievement whores.
2) You say there are three distinctive experiences offered by the three consoles, yet you only mention Wii and 360. What're you trying to say about the PS3 there I wonder?
Maybe they'd be better off with a bi-yearly update, a reasonable cycle in gaming development. That way you could actually add something new. Maybe just update the stats and some features through DLC or an reasonable expansion pack (cheaper to produce but would still be profitable). I certainly don't have the will to buy the same game more than once. Especially now games prices have reached an all time peak.
PES while only offering seemingly slight tweaks somehow has rendered the previous update unplayable most of the time (2008 being the exception). With EA I have been playing the same game since at least the PS2 era. Except for FIFA where I feel like I am playing an inferior PES these days. Though it is still an improvement.
As for the licensing...this has only given off the impression that EA has no faith in their software to compete on an even footing.
Also, I thought the whole point of football games is that you can play with your pathetic local team and win the premiership with them? If there were weekly updates then your little club would just stay s**t. So that means you are forced to do crap just because that's what happened in real life?
I can see benefits to online updates...I mean you would be able to turn off the additions and injuries. A lot of sports fans like to emulate situations in tune with the season or team they are following. I find it hard to see how this will be implimented though considering game time moves faster than reality. But to state it as a groundbreaking idea is taking things a little too far. The quest is how actually to implement such things.
Core changes to gameplay are needed. I can see many and not overly ambitious ideas that most certainly should have been implemented in sports titles for this generation.
The industry is always about 7 years behind what most gamers see as being obvious. One day the execs will all be people who have lived and breathed gaming...
I'm not sure about the "people don't have the time" to play games anymore quote. It depends on the game. He's obviously targeting the Nintendo "casual" market. Just what you what expect from a bloody marketing man.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
