In the fourth and final of MCV’s interviews with Electronic Arts label business, Christopher Dring speaks to EAi SVP Nick Earl on being the one part of EA that has nothing whatsoever to do with boxed video games
Where does EA Interactive fit in with the wider EA business? We’ve got six labels: EA Sports, EA Games, Bioware, Maxis, PopCap and EAi – but we’re actually going to change our name to All Play. All six have some amount of mobile and social going on. PopCap and EAi are the two most invested and EAi shrink wraps nothing, we have no physical goods.
If you look at EA Sports with their franchises like FIFA, they span out across multiple devices and that’s a concept that we really believe in. We look to take franchises and make them so you can play to some degree any time, anywhere, on any device. EAi does pure social/mobile but we aim for the mass casual audience. We go out to the soccer mums, to the people who don’t necessarily have a console, but play games like Scrabble, Tetris, Sims Free Playor
16 July 27th 2012
something like that. We’re the tip of the spear for EA in terms of building the technology, figuring out the process and how to work with the audience that’s playing on phones and tablets, and then we share that knowledge with the other labels.
Casual ad-based games portal Pogo is part of your label. How is that progressing?
That is in the process of being modernised with a new social graph and for new devices, because there is something magical about a system where you earn medals and move up in the hierarchy inside of that world. It’s very tournament oriented so we’re bringing that over to social.
How does Playfish fit into EAi? With Playfish we gave two of their studios our biggest IPs. We gave The Simsto the London studio and
In the past, it’s been all about one-time payment for a download. But the future is not that, the future is freemium.
“ Nick Earl, EAi
we gave SimCityto the Beijing studio. In the latest reorganisation we moved those two studios under the Maxis label because Maxis are the world experts on The Simsand SimCity. So we split Playfish’s five studios, three stayed with me and two went to Maxis. We haven’t talked a lot about our organisation. I think people are fatigued by the amount of reworks that has gone on within EA. I sense that this latest rework is the right one. There’s a spirited collaboration and partnership across labels now.
How do most of your mobile and social games generate money? In the past, it’s been one-time payment for a download. But the future is not about that, the future is freemium where you download or free and you can grind your way