Interviews// EA Sports Head Peter Moore

Peter Moore on platforms and franchises:

SPOnG: What’s EA Sports’ biggest platform these days: the Wii?

PM: No, it varies – it depends on what we ship in any given quarter. Madden just shipped, and it sold much more on the Xbox 360 and PS3 than on the Wii. FIFA the same. The three franchises with real strength on the Wii are EA Sports Active, obviously, as it’s exclusive on the Wii, Tiger Woods and Grand Slam Tennis. With everything else, the PS3 and Xbox 360 will dominate.

SPOnG: Has EA Sports been looking around for new IPs recently? You’ve got all your big licences, but they have been extant for a long time, apart from Grand Slam Tennis.

PM: Grand Slam Tennis is brand-new, EA Sports Active is brand-new and Mixed Martial Arts will come out soon. There are three new licences we have built in the last 18 months, and we had gone six years without a new franchise. So, by our standards, that’s a flurry of activity in new IP.

Peter Moore on the PC:

SPOnG: Onto another one of your favourite subjects: the PC. But action/sports titles just don’t seem to make sense via a keyboard. Would you agree?

PM: I’ve never even played driving games with a keyboard. My opinion is that we’ve conditioned our gamers for that big screen, with the big sound around them. The PC is still an important platform for us at EA Sports; we’re just not going to do it the way we used to. But online, going back to the cloud: you should go and play Tiger Woods on the booth, because it’s browser-based. We have got to be there with our franchises, but not with the old PC model, quite frankly.

Slower-paced games like RPGs make sense with a keyboard and mouse, but not the fast-twitch ones. Strategy games, absolutely, and games like RTSes, which are starting to die out – it’s amazing how we’ve seen the demise of the RTS in the last few years, particularly from Microsoft, who were the kings of RTSes.

SPOnG: Thanks for your time, Peter.