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MCV 15/10/10 17 MCV INTERVIEW PETER MOORE, EA SPORTS
you accept that the vast majority of users will never pay you a penny and you learn to be cool with that. “Plus you get people like me who want deeper engagement, and can’t sit still waiting for their three daily match credits or whatever, so we pay to accelerate our gameplay and create better teams, and that’s nice but it’s not really the point. “What you are now starting to see is some linkage between FIFA Superstars and unlocking some features in FIFA 11. It’s baby steps towards persistence and presence for a full FIFA ecosystem.” And that, obviously, is where the franchise, just like the sport, is heading: “Football for most of us is pretty constant. This year there was, what, a 15 day off season. And even then we were thinking about it and reading about it. That’s the space football occupies in our lives and that’s how we’ve got to look at it. “We need to provide that persistent world, maybe sometimes powered by discs, maybe on social networks, or the cloud or whatever. That’s the team’s vision. Personally I still think there’ll be discs five years from now. One of the great things about FIFA is that it does permeate pretty much every corner of the world and there will be countries that don’t have the broadband infrastructure that we’re used to. “It’s why we invested in PC as well.
There will “come a time when FIFA is less a disc that you wait for and more something that we provide 365 days a year,” says Moore
four or five years ago, so they’re not to be trifled with. We take the competition seriously, we enjoy it and they make our job a lot more fun. There’s no question of relaxing or feeling comfortable – that’s just not in our nature.” As well as the lead in quality and sales volumes, Moore highlights another factor on FIFA’s side: networked gaming and community momentum. “The sticky factor of online being strong helps enormously. That’s the challenge PES faces right now, because if you and your mates are all buying FIFA and you all play online – and we’re at an 80 per cent connect rate now – it makes it more difficult for the second place guy to disrupt that. You want to play with your mates, you want to play online, and if your mates have got a different game you’re the odd man out.”
It’s a numbers game, essentially,
turning FIFA into a new kind of platform. Further encouragement to stay online has come in the form of the Online Pass that comes in the box and unlocks extra content – providing you buy a new rather than second-hand copy of the game.
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“Anyone that doesn’t have that code we ask for $10 to open up this huge world that we’re literally spending millions and millions of dollars building. Right now the monstrous majority of people buying the games with Online Pass are getting something for free that they weren’t getting last year. People see it as a plus, I think.”
Linking FIFA on Facebook and console is baby steps towards persistence for a full FIFA ecosystem.
Peter Moore, EA Sports
It’s a tactic that has provoked some debate, but Moore believes the arguments have died down and that the benefits are clear. “Because the game’s only just out, pretty much everyone that owns FIFA, is getting extra digital content simply for registering their code.
Playfish since it was acquired by EA in a deal worth up to $400m late last year. It has just hit 4.3m monthly average users and Moore is pleased with the new member of the FIFA family – as well as realistic about the business model. “The business model’s simple:
”
SEASONAL CHANGE Another new ingredient in the FIFA mix this year is FIFA Superstars, the Facebook game and the first product created by
It’s the one genre where we can see growth in Eastern Europe – the broadband infrastructure and console penetration isn’t there, but they love to play on their PCs. And there’s still a model that justifies us spending a lot of money and putting PC discs out into the market.
“But generally yes, of course, I think there will come a time when FIFA is less a disc that you wait for in late September/early October, and more something that we provide 365 days a year.
“There will be beats and cadences where we ship something here and ship something there and that may be physical and it may be digital. “It will reflect football. It’s always with us, it’s always changing, it peaks sometimes, but it’s 365 days a year, 24/7 and completely global. In a few years time I expect to have less of a team developing and as many if not more doing live operations.” Who knows, by then, Liverpool may even have a decent side again.
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