Interviews// EA Sports Head Peter Moore

SPOnG: It’s a funny franchise, FIFA, as it has been up and down over the years. It seemed to enter a trough in about 2001, and is only just recovering now?

PM: I think what happened was that the console transition was a particularly difficult time. I wasn’t around in those days, but you’ve clearly got to make sure you don’t lose it, and they must have lost it there for a little bit. The good news is that we’ve got our mojo back.

SPOnG: Where can these sports games go? We’ve been promised 10 v 10 play in football games, for example.

PM: You can do 10 v 10 now – that became reality in FIFA 09. A lot of people practised and night, and Wednesday night was game night, and off they went. A lot of people have got the high bandwidth to facilitate that now. Now, in FIFA 10, you can be in the game yourself. So, theoretically ten of us over here could put our heads on players and go play ten people over there.

But where can sports games go? I think they can continue to be a reflection of real sports life. What we’ve got to do now is continue to bring these games to life so that they reflect anything that’s going on at any given time in the season. We’ve got to look at these things more as a service than physical packaged goods that we update every now and then.

Peter Moore on downloads versus traditional retail games:

SPOnG: That brings us to downloads versus boxed games. How much life is left in the traditional boxed game, do you reckon?

PM: There’s still a lot of life – for many, many years, we’ll still be buying disks. But I think most people understand, whether it’s five years, ten years or 50 years from now, disks won’t exist – they’ll go the way of 8-track cartridges and everything else. Once we get bandwidth and local storage, games will ultimately be played out of the cloud, or downloaded onto your hard drive. That’s just the way the world, eventually, will go. But we’re a long way away from that at the moment.

SPOnG: What are your thoughts on the next generation of consoles: it has been suggested that one of those might take the plunge and be download-only?

PM: Well, I’m out of that side of the business, obviously, so as an interested observer who is a third-party publisher, I think there’s no doubt we’re going to see much, much bigger hard drives. And, yes, somebody might have the courage to do one without a disk-tray, and if you’re not connected online, then they as a company are not interested in you. I think we’re probably still a long way away from that, because the great majority of people still have an interest in physical disks, and the size of games is prohibitive.

Peter Moore on console cycles past and present:

SPOnG: We’re quite well advanced on this console cycle, although I get the impression that the protagonists want to make it last as long as possible.

PM: If you look at history, typically 80 per cent of the business of a console is done at $199 and below, and we’re not there yet. OK, Microsoft is there with the Arcade unit (The Xbox 360 Elite's price cut occurred after this interview. Ed), but Sony is not there, and Nintendo clearly isn’t there. While, eventually, they will get there, that’s where the real volume of the business is done. But this feels like a healthy cycle.

SPOnG: Are you disappointed that Sony didn’t grasp the $199/£199 nettle with the PS3 Slim? They didn’t seem able to do that.

PM: I would say that is a big price-drop from where they’re at. I think price-drops are usually done in increments, and the next increment down for them was $299, and they decided to see what consumer-segment they’ll get there, and eventually... (at this point he tails off).