It’s been a good year for EA Sports. NCAA Football 13 topped charts when it launched in July, and Madden sold 1.65 million copies in a week when it was released in August. Two weeks later, NHL 13 had a record-breaking launch with 484,000 copies sold in seven days, and just last week EA announced that 4.5 million copies of FIFA were sold in less than a week.
In an industry where millions of gamers are disappearing and game sales are down overall, how has EA managed to find so much success? We spoke to EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson about what sets EA apart, how it can ensure success for the future, and what other franchises can do to match the massive success of this year’s launches.
“We couldn’t be happier,” Wilson told IGN. “Certainly our world is not without its challenges right now with respect to everything that’s going on in our industry, but I believe our teams have continued to deliver and sports gamers have kind of rallied for us, which has been phenomenal. For the last few years, every year has been better than the last for EA Sports in a world where that hasn’t always been the case, and I believe it comes down to what we have focused on. As a team we got together over the last couple of years and said ‘listen, we really need to focus in on what’s important and focus in on what gamers want out of us to ensure our long term health and growth.’ And it’s worked very well for us.”
According to Wilson, the teams at EA Sports focus on three core pillars in order to achieve success --- innovation, services, and connectivity. To Wilson, that first pillar means “putting innovation into a game that fundamentally changes the way you play each year,” he explains. “At a time where everyone believes that we’re going to rest on our laurels and just kind of phone it in this late in a console cycle, we’re going harder than ever into this stuff. We put physics in Madden. It was an amazing innovation that changed the way you play. We had true performance skating in hockey, a fundamentally different skating mechanic. First Touch and the Impact Engine in FIFA. These are fundamental innovations of the core game that change the way you play and ultimately deliver a quality experience, and I think the critical reviews we’ve had on all three products are a testament to that level of innovation and quality that we’ve driven against.”
Beyond innovation, Wilson believes that including additional services for gamers has become a major part of EA’s strategy. “The second pillar that we really focus on is moving from product to product plus service,” he said. “No longer is what you get on a disc the sum total of your experience. Whether it’s FIFA Ultimate Team or Madden Ultimate Team or Hockey Ultimate Team, or even Sports Football Club that delivers you live challenges with a match day experience this year, whether it’s Connected Careers in Madden and Madden Moments Live. This is new content, new experience delivered to you daily, weekly, monthly that changes the game as you play, so it keeps the experience rich. It keeps the experience dynamic and it keeps the experience from being stale. And I believe that that’s what’s driving the level of engagement that we’re seeing.”
As for the final pillar, “It’s connecting gamers to each other,” Wilson says. “It’s connecting gamers to the sport they love. It’s connecting the experience they have across platforms, so that you can engage with your game even while you’re away from your 60 inch television. And it’s really coming around to a point where it connects gamers with us, so that we have a better sense of what to deliver them tomorrow, next week, next month, next year.”
But what happens when a game can’t quite live up to those pillars? EA recently shelved NBA Live 13 in order to make sure it “gets it right” before the series returns to gamers. “We have very high expectations of ourselves, I believe higher than even the gaming population puts on us. And the reality is NBA just isn’t there yet,” Wilson said. “Quality is really made up of two key components. One is innovation that changes the way you play, and the other is polish. It has to be free of those issues that detract from the experience and shatter the suspension of disbelief. And we just weren’t there on NBA.”
The reality is that creating fun is not easy, and sometimes you just don’t know whether you have it or not until the very last opportunity.
As for what NBA can do to match other EA Sports brands, Wilson believes it comes down to the same pillars as any other project. “I am confident that we will continue to push hard against these three pillars for NBA like we have with FIFA and Madden and NHL and that we will see the product and the service and the connecting ability for NBA fans there like we do in our other franchises. The reality is that creating fun is not easy, and sometimes you just don’t know whether you have it or not until the very last opportunity. We always want to give our teams the greatest chance to deliver quality, but more importantly than that I think what we have shown is that we have the constitution to stay the course around putting the consumer first and around delivering quality while things are challenging, not just while things are easy. It’s really easy for us to say ‘yeah, we’re committed to the game on FIFA’ when FIFA’s doing so well. And we are. But it’s a little harder for us as a brand, as a group, as a company to stay that course and maintain that commitment when things aren’t going as we wanted them to. But what I’ve come out of this with is a level of pride in our organization for maintaining that level of commitment to the gamer even in the face of fairly strong adversity. I think it demonstrates a constitution that I’m not sure a lot of other companies or teams have.”
Wilson also commented on recent reports that NBA Live 13 would have been downloadable and what a shift to digital could mean for the future of the industry. “We never announced anything around NBA being digital or otherwise, so with respect to NBA, no comment on that front. As it relates to digital downloads in general, we made FIFA available at launch as a digital download this year on Sony platforms. There are a bunch of gamers who took us up on that opportunity to do downloads, so for me it’s not nearly as much about the health of the franchise but more about how gamers want to purchase and interact with our product. And I do believe digital downloads will definitely be a part of our future, but we are not prophesying that that would be the only way people will interact with us anytime soon.”
One way players continue to interact is through NHL 13’s online modes, especially in the wake of the real-life NHL lockout currently preventing games from taking place. When asked if he expects more fans to turn to NHL 13 as a result of the lockout, Wilson commented “We’re all NHL fans. We’re all sports fans, but we’re definitely NHL fans. I spent six years in Vancouver, which is a hardcore hockey town. We hope that they all get to play soon, but in the meantime, I can tell you right now that that’s where I’m getting my hockey.”
These guys believe it is their responsibility, it is their obligation to innovate. And they see the length of the console cycle as just one more challenge to overcome, and it invigorates them.
Wilson is confident that EA Sports will continue to innovate even in the wake of an aging console cycle. “I think the teams can do it because the teams are amazing. I couldn’t be prouder of our Sports teams,” he told us. “They just do amazing things. You know, there’s a lot of criticism of sports games in general and the commitment that we have when we come to work every day to deliver that level of innovation. What I can tell you is these guys believe it is their responsibility, it is their obligation to innovate. And they see the length of the console cycle as just one more challenge to overcome, and it invigorates them. When they’re able to do something this great, they feel like they have lived up to their responsibility, lived up to their obligation to gamers. I can’t say enough about what they do, and that’s why they do it. And next year, I am confident they will do it again, because they are truly amazing teams. Our industry is full of really smart and creative people, and I may be a little biased but I think with what our teams do, they are certainly some of the best teams in the industry.”
Looking forward, Wilson believes that future EA Sports titles like the next Tiger Woods and NCAA Football will continue the publisher’s recent trend. “I’m tremendously optimistic,” Wilson said. “Last month, I was with a bunch of the teams as we start looking towards the next cycle and the stuff that I’m seeing is as exciting as the stuff that we delivered this year. And so, as I said before, I continue to be amazed by what our teams deliver. They never rest. They go home at night, I’m certain, and stare at the ceiling while they’re lying in bed thinking of great new ways to deliver interactive sports entertainment to gamers. And so I continue to be very excited about our future.”
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.
Special thanks to Brian Altano for creating the infographic above. You can follow him on Twitter at @agentbizzle, or on IGN at b-altano-ign.
Source : ign[dot]com
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