http://www.vg247.com/2009/04/30/ea-spor ... ays-moore/
http://www.vg247.com/2009/04/30/peter-m ... round-one/
Going back to your core titles for a second, I want to talk about the PC SKUs on your core games. You very unceremoniously dropped the PC version of Madden last year, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth…
Oh yeah.
…and then said in June ‘08 that your PC SKUs would be back in ‘09.
I’ll tell you exactly what I said. We’ve got to look at the PC in a very different what to we are, which is shipping discs in a market that was, unfortunately, just disappearing. And unfortunately the market was going down in sales but going up in costs, as I was supporting people that didn’t buy the game but I was supporting online as well as customer service support. As you can imagine, and we’ve talked about it a little bit with Tiger, we’ve got to go online with this stuff.
It’s not that we’re abandoning the PC user, the guy that wants to play sports games on the PC. I’ve got to look at teams, and I’ve got to keep people employed and therefore games have to be profitable, otherwise where do I get the money to reinvest in building the games?
Sometimes gamers don’t like to hear that, that this is a business, and I always tiptoe around it a little bit, because it’s a creative thing, and they think we have an obligation, which we do, to do things creatively, whether it makes money or not.
The sheer truth of it is that it’s got to make money because I need the capital the following year to buy more dev kits, to hire more engineers. And you have to make tough choices with business, much more now than two of three years ago, when you could afford to do some things that maybe weren’t profitable. And we need to find different business models to go after that consumer again.
You’re going to see some announcements in the next few months about how we’re going to do that. I get a lot of abuse. You read my blog, I’m sure. “Why can’t you tell us? We demand to know!” I tried a few posts ago to explain how the world of announcements works, particularly when you work in my world, where you’ve got to get approvals from everybody… and until it all comes together, there are certain things we can’t say. That’s frustrating, I know, for gamers, but they need to understand. There are competitive reasons I can’t make announcements on this. There’s cannibalization reasons that I don’t want to talk about what’s coming down the road, because I need to sell you that Coke Zero before I sell you Coke Zero 2.
So, it’s challenging. I know we do frustrate a lot of the folks, and you do see some commentary on the blog. But it’s not that we’re abandoning the PC as a platform for sports gaming. You might say we’re abandoning the old model of physical media because we believe the future is online and connected.
You’re going to see us take a lot of our learnings from what we’re doing with our games in Asia, where I’ll give you the game for free, or a certain level for free. And my hope is that you’re enjoying it that much that you’ll buy things and you’ll upsell. And then there’s no barrier to entry whatsoever.
I will challenge you on that point a little bit. You did bring out a PC disc version of FIFA last year.
Yeah. FIFA’s the one game we can sell on a global basis, and I don’t rely on ubiquitous broadband. So, FIFA sales in Eastern Europe, Russia, all around the world are a little easier for me, and it’s a little easier to justify - as we have in Vancouver - a PC team to develop it. When I look at the forecast, and the sales we get on PC FIFA globally, it’s justifiable as a resource expense to still do it on a physical disc.Actually, we did the same with NHL, because we had very strong interest for NHL on the PC in Eastern Europe and again in Russia and Scandinavia. Scandinavia’s got good broadband, but some of the Eastern European and Russian markets are still struggling a bit to get their infrastructure up and running.But once the infrastructure’s there, then I’d rather deliver it direct to their hard drives, give them a different business model than shipping on a disc.
Talking specifically, is the next PC version of Madden going to be downloadable?
You could say that when we’re ready to look at which franchises are going to be more applicable to be playing on the PC, we’ve said this repeatedly: it’s an online-based model. The actual structure of whether it’s browser-based, whether I give you a client, whether it’s subscription gaming, all of these things are yet to be determined.