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EA Sports President
Peter Moore |
EA Sports President
PETER MOORE, in a Q&A with NEXT-GEN.biz' Colin Campbell, notes there are a "lot of people who know [the EA Sports brand] very well and have never played a videogame," and added his company's biggest challenge right now is "getting those people -- sports fans -- to start wanting to experience an interactive sports experience." Moore: "The EA Sports brand was the real impetus for me coming here. It really stands for something. It’s broken through from being a subset of a publisher to a stand-alone brand on its own." Campbell writes Moore's approach to introducing more people to the interactive sports experience is "two-fold. Firstly, elevating the brand further in the minds of sports fans through merchandising and promotional deals, such as the one with IMG, and, much more controversially, making the games themselves more appealing to non-gamers." Moore: "We’ve got to bring more people in. We’ve got to grow the sports business ... you know, the interface on our games is just too complicated for those folks and we have to change that, and we’re doing a lot of work to do that without dumbing down the games. ... What we’ve got to do to grow the market is bring in the football fans that own high def [HD] TVs, that love football, and yet don’t enjoy our games because they see them as too hard." Moore: "We’ve got to be able to get that consumer interested in EA Sports, otherwise we’ll be stuck in a very large niche, which is the sports gamer.''
MISSING BASEBALL: Campbell reported Moore is "looking at spin-offs, the Asian market, MMO sports games, fantasy games, basically, the works. But there’s still this hole right in the middle of EA Sports and it’s called baseball." Moore: "Yeah, baseball. I’m a huge baseball fan so it pains me a little, as it does a lot of people, that we don’t have an entry into baseball right now." EA, which was kept out of the baseball market when Take-Two signed an exclusive deal with MLB, said that it is "waiting for an opportunity to arise when it can once again produce baseball games"(NEXT-GEN.biz, 3/26).
