EA Sports' Peter Moore

Part two of our GamesCom interview

What follows is part two of our Peter Moore interview from GamesCom 2009.

Interesting that you mention the cloud. What is your view of the emerging cloud services like Gaikai and OnLive?

Well we're looking at both of those. I've certainly taken a deeper look at OnLive. There is a lot of challenges, but ultimately whether it's next year, ten years, 100 years from now... is it called 'media'? Is it going to exist? There is no doubt about it. The ability for you to deliver a seamless gaming experience to whatever device you want is going to be there in the short term. There's lot of barriers which both companies have been very open about. A lot of hard work is going to be required. If a million people want to play FIFA at the same time, which they do, how does that happen? These technical issues, which ultimately people will resolve, right now get in the way of a seamless experience. I have no doubt that you deliver for me, on a server, FIFA streaming seamlessly where I can pick it up, stop it and go back to it whenever I like. Scaling that is a real challenge.

Talking about new formats in general. What is your view of the iPhone?

Well, it's an interesting platform. We're already on there. We do both games as well as applications that support our console games on there. It's a little challenging - as someone said there are over 7,000 games available on there now. A lot of which are free, a lot of which are 99 cents , and maybe some are 4.99 USD and very few are 9.99 USD. From a business model perspective we've got to figure out how much effort do we put into something. How do we improve navigation? I've just started to play Tiger Woods Mobile on my Blackberry. I actually enjoy it but I know we can do this a lot better. Have you tried it?

PR chap: Nope.

Tiger 09 - you should try it. I'll approve your expenses. You should download it. I did before getting on the plane, and played it for a couple of hours. You know with the screen and the buttons, it's actually not bad. It's fun. But with a market like this, with limited resources, you really just apply yourself to make sure you're keeping everyone in employment and happy and not doing pro-bono work a little bit. We will support the iPhone and we are doing, and when we ship our big games, typically top ten sellers, we're also using it to supporting our console games - with Madden Online, our NFL game, you can check and work on your franchise on your iPhone as an app you download that then impacts your console game.

Do you think there is a sport that hasn't been covered yet by a game?

I think all sports somewhere have a game, at least a browser-based game.

Curling?

I bet you could find a curling game somewhere!

On the iPhone?

Some Flash based game for free. No! It'll be developed by a scotsman so it'll be 99 cents [laughter]. In our world big games, authentic games, licenced games. I get lobbied a lot by gamers who want their sport to be on there. We can't do everything. What you don't want to do is, given you only have so many people to make the games, is to dilute the quality. Alright we're going to make loads of games, all of a sudden I've got really small teams and the quality suffers. You just have to be pretty hardcore about what you can do and what can't do. There's a lot of stuff... we have to make a lot of decisions.

Any decisions that you've changed you mind about?

Naaaaa. Our big bets have recently been getting into the fitness business with EA Sports Active and then Mixed Martial Arts. Big fan. We made a decision pretty early on in the label being formed that MMA was a world sport of the future. We stopped doing a particular sport to accommodate that. We made a hard call on something that we decided to walk away from, because you can't do everything. In today's world where we'll hire 50-60 people you have to manage your expenses accordingly and you make trade offs. We had to make some hard trade-offs. We're delighted to be getting into MMA and we think it's going to be a big story in 2010.