INTERVIEW PETER MOORE
EA Sports has become its own
brand. But Moore says the publisher views it more as a seal of quality. “Great brands act as a comfort
FIFA 15 is now a 365-day a year experience, says Moore
Battlefield as a player-first decision as it needed extra time. We don’t worry about having to live up to our quarterly numbers. We worry about living up to the reputation of the game to our fans.”
WORLD CUP QUESTIONS Back in 2012 EA released a tie-in for the European Championships. It wasn’t the usual retail boxed release, but rather DLC for FIFA 12. This year the firm went back to
Plan A with its official World Cup game, creating a boxed title for Xbox 360 and PS3. Yet Moore is still not entirely satisfied. “Digital-only was too early with
the Euro game,” he says. “That was over two years ago.
There was still a great demand for physical media at that time. “This year’s World Cup game
sold well and we’ll make sure retailers clean out their inventories and move onto the next thing. But what we’ve learnt is that FIFA is a 365-day experience. People are just so invested in Ultimate Team. “When we delivered World Cup Ultimate Team [for FIFA 14), most of our players moved to that. The idea of them coming out of their investment in Ultimate Team and then coming to an event-based game... people were loath to do that. Still delivering [the World Cup game) physically was important as a global product. But when we get to the World Cup in Russia in 2018 we’ll see where the industry is at and what consumers want. Do we do another standalone World
August 29th 2014
Cup game or is it embedded into Ultimate Team?” Not that retail needs to worry, adds Moore. As more stores learn to benefit from digital, the news that the next World Cup game may not be released in a box is not something that should create undue concern. “The world’s top retailers have seen digital coming for many years and have embraced it,” says Moore. “Living in America, GameStop has done a fantastic job. It has learnt the lessons of the music industry. You don’t try and push digital back, you embrace it. GameStop talks a lot about the digital opportunities that they present their customers with. It’s very aggressive in this space. And GAME does the same in the UK.”
LEAGUE OF ITS OWN Peter Moore was at White Hart Lane to announce a new deal between EA and the Premier League. The two have held a licensing partnership that stretches back almost 20 years and this year EA’s Canadian studio has rendered every Premier League stadium and scanned over 200 real player faces for FIFA 15. But there’s more to it than
that. Fans will have noticed EA Sports’ logo appearing during live matches. It is on referee shirts, besides the match stats, and now EA is sponsoring the Goal Decision System, too [the tech that sees if the ball crossed the goal line].
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blanket for the level of quality or authenticity,” he says. “And we live up to our tagline: ‘It’s in the game’ and that helps us hugely. That’s what the EA Sports brand is about. “We don’t spend money specifically on the EA Sports brand. It’s like the seal of good housekeeping – if you see that on a product you know what you’re getting. We’re very proud of that.” Moore adds that the firm now measures its success not so much on impressions, but engagement. And that’s true of its franchises. EA historically would tell MCV
that FIFA is still tiny compared to the actual sport that it simulates. The firm would say there is still a lot of room for it to get even bigger. But today, the rhetoric is less
If you see the EA Sports logo you know what you’re getting. We’re very proud of that.
Peter Moore, EA
about growing FIFA’s audience, but rather making sure that these gamers keep playing, That long after the game is launched, they are still booting it up and spending money on things like Ultimate Team. “I’d like to grow the experience
rather than the game,” says Moore. “I remember being presented with a crazy idea in Vancouver in 2009. Someone was saying we should start to think about fantasy, and what we dream of as football fans. What would it be like if you or I was in the midfield playing alongside Steven Gerrard and Jordan Henderson? “In Ultimate Team, you can live
up to that. I remember walking into someone’s cube in Vancouver and it said ‘Ultimate Team’ on the White Board. We green lit and invested in it and the rest is history.” He adds: “As football fans we think about this sport every day. As a kid, Liverpool dominated my life. It was the great days of the early 1970s and it’s all I ever thought about. We’ve captured that lightning in a bottle with Ultimate Team. It’s alive every single day, just like the world of football is. “Our job, our mission, is to get
even more people involved in Ultimate Team.” Turn to page 20 for our look at this year’s Ultimate Team mode.
www.mcvuk.com
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