THE MANY FACES OF EA: DAVID DEMARTINI, EA ORIGIN
customers choice. We feel we have an opportunity to partner with our internal studios in a way that no one else can in terms of adding exclusive content, or having an insider view on the game that’s being developed. That doesn’t mean that people will or can only buy from Origin. If we don’t violate any of Steam’s rules all of our games are available on Steam – they’re certainly available
Our crowd-funding promotion is one of the few things we’ve done that nobody had anything negative to say about.
“ David DeMartini, EA
at places like GameStop. It’s very much a re-enforcement of the fact we believe in choice. We’re just trying to earn your business by being the best downloadable game site that we can be.
Steam doesn’t want EA pushing Origin on its service – just as other retailers in the past didn’t want to stock games that had Steam built into them. Does the industry need to move beyond this fear of ‘giving away’ customers? We sell games on Origin that are Steamworks-wrapped and we are absolutely not afraid of that. We believe that you earn the customers’ business on a transaction by transaction basis, and we are willing to earn that right to be able to sell you a product over and over again. By virtue of the quality of the service that we provide, the loyalty programs and the achievements, we’ll try and earn your business back. If we break that chain and you want to buy from Steam or GameStop, great. As long as you’re
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buying one of EA’s great intellectual properties we kinda don’t care where you buy it.
Think of this: if MySpace had stayed the one answer in social networking and no one wanted to switch to Facebook, then we wouldn’t have had the Facebook phenomenon. There are better mousetraps that ultimately get built when other people try and do a better version of what someone has done. That’s what we’re attempting to do on Origin. Gabe [Newell, Valve CEO] was quick to point out, in the first time he spoke about Origin publicly, that he didn’t think we’d achieved that yet. I agree, we’re on a path of constant improvement. And I didn’t expect to out feature Steam within our first twelve months. But I’m optimistic that we will differentiate ourselves as a service. The first year was about putting a good foundation together and if you take a look at where we started and where we are now, you’ll see a constant release- by-release improvement.
Gabe Newell mentioning you on- stage must also highlight how far you’ve come.
He has never uttered the word Origin before. There were a few pregnant pauses in his comments, but we are now in the conversation. If 12 months ago you would have said we’d be in the conversation, I would have been pretty happy. And when you look at the fact that over 12m people have downloaded Origin, we have over 50 partners on the service in less than 12 months, and we did over $150m in revenue, which represented over 400 per cent growth over the previous year, you can see we are
making huge progress. EA is a really interesting place. We have this bar that is set so high, in that whether it is a game or a service, we want to be 90-plus Metacritic at everything. Origin is moving in that direction. We are not there yet. But people come in inspired every day to make sure we are going to get there soon.
What is the split between third- and first-party content on Origin? Right now the split is heavily EA games. But you are going to see more exclusives and offers from third parties coming onto Origin. If you go onto Origin you’ll see third- party titles featured on a daily basis.
What do you do when you have an EA game clash with a big game from a partner publisher? It is kind of like when 15 or 20 planes are all coming in to Heathrow at the same time, you have air traffic control. You control it so that all the planes don’t hit each other. The great thing about being in the retail business is that I don’t get to decide what is popular. The players do. So if at any given point in time they are choosing Batman over Battlefield, then great, we are selling a lot of Batman. If two titles launch on top of each other, you put them both in the ring of fame and put them up in the hero images as they rotate through and the customers get to pick which one they really want.
How do you judge Origin’s success? Is it about the numbers or the consumer reaction? It’s both. You have to be careful when you run one of these services not to get all caught up in the numbers. In the enormous industry move towards analytics and numerology, it’s easy to just look at the numbers and judge the quality of your service based on ‘did I grow revenue?’, ‘did this many download the app?’ If you obsessively focus on quality, everything else takes care of itself. Don’t worry about how much sales growth you have, worry about how good your next feature implementation is and then customers will gravitate to your service. If they gravitate to your service, they’re more likely to make a purchase, then your
sales will grow. It’s like video games. I had the Tiger Woodsseries for four years from 2002 to 2006. We never worried about how many versions of Tigerwe sold, we worried about turning it from a 68 Metacritic, which is what is was before we took it over, to an 82, to an 88, to a 92. By virtue of having that improvement year- over-year the sales, of course, took care of themselves.
The number of gamers who have downloaded the EA Origin application
12m
What sort of features do you have coming to Origin?
Without being that specific about our feature roadmap as we do have a competitor, we want to make Origin sticky. I do not feel like we are sticky enough yet. As Facebook has demonstrated, people get excited about challenging each other, seeing each others achievements, seeing what each other bought and what each other is playing, so you can expect us to lean in that direction.
Do you want the likes of PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox to open their platforms up so you can sell games for them? We absolutely want to be cross- platform and EA has significantly invested in covering mobile, social, PC, Xbox, Nintendo and Sony. We want to be a gaming hub because it’s not like you just want to compare with your friends on how you did in PC gaming. You might want to play Battlefield on 360, or Need for Speed on PS3, and compare achievements across all those platforms. Origin has never been intended to be a PC- only reflection of how you do in games, it’s been created to reflect how you are performing across EA’s entire gaming universe and our third party partners’ entire gaming universe and that’s what we’re going to move to this year.
Next week we discuss Dead Space, Need for Speed and Medal of Honor with EA Games’ marketing boss Laura Miele. You can read last week’s chat with EA Sports EVP Andrew Wilson via the MCV digital edition. In two weeks’ time we talk mobile with EAi chief Nick Earl.
July 13th 2012 17
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