There are new beginnings for both Tiger Woods and Electronic Arts this week as he tees off at the Masters today and EA tries a radical reworking of its strategy for PC sports games.
The free-to-play Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online just launched represents the first EA PC sports title to be moved online. The rest may follow in short order as EA abandons physical media, says Peter Moore, EA Sports president. His thoughts on piracy, virtual goods and the trials of Tiger after the jump:
EA has continued to support Tiger Woods despite his widely reported problems, what was your thinking?
We are now in the 12th year of a relationship with Tiger – almost since he left Stanford [University] – and he has been a tremendous part of our business for that period of time. He lives in Orlando where our studio is, he’s a gamer, our games are about simulating the world’s greatest athletes on the field of play and golf is no different. He’s the world’s greatest golfer until somebody proves otherwise and whilst we’re very sympathetic and very sensitive to the challenges he’s gone through in his personal life, our relationship with him is rooted in the golf and he’s embedded in our game rather than simply being an arms-length endorser which I think he was for many of the other companies that have since said goodbye to him, there’s never been any wavering in our support of him as a golfer.
Is this a testing ground for you in terms of getting PC games online and trying a new strategy here?
It’s a very different experience having to boot up your Xbox 360, load the game and play on a wide-screen TV, this is built to attract people who wouldn’t ordinarily call themselves core video gamers. What we are seeing is people who are actual golfers, that are 40 years of age plus, affluent, have less time on their hands, love the game of golf, play the game of golf – 90 per cent of them responded in our beta survey saying I actually go out on the links and play and we see it as a real complement to our core offering.
This is probably the future of how we continue to grow our business in a world where packaged goods media is flat to declining, how do you bring more people in who wouldn’t ordinarily be customers in the current business model? Having the free experience is very different and it can also be dangerous – our job is to bring people in with no barrier to price or equipment, only a very small download and you are up and running and it’s a good experience streaming right out of your browser.
How much is piracy a problem and the fact that PC game buyers are moving to the console because they prefer the controllers?
There are a number of factors and piracy is an issue. [Tiger Woods on the PC] over the last seven or eight years has declined every single year as people migrated to the console, but we still wanted to offer PC gamers an experience without us having to quite frankly lose money , and that’s what we were doing in the last three years of shipping CD-Roms for PCs and experiencing the piracy issues and sales that had declined from a peak of 8-900,000 units down to a couple of hundred thousand units, with no decline in development and marketing costs. So we said two years ago we’re looking at different ways to bring sport to the PC and today is the first day of the future of what I think is a very entertaining, simple to play, inexpensive bite-sized experience.
If it’s a success, what other sports will you look to move online? Golf looks the easiest to do in terms of keyboard controls.
Golf was the obvious one because first, we have the greatest IP and we’ve been the dominant player, secondly, there’s less going on when you look at the screen, the keyboard is dealing with a single individual. We are launching Fifa [soccer] online around the time of the World Cup, albeit it being a slightly different model – there is a client download because of the size and scale and a lot of the game mechanic is a manager-type mechanic. But we will be looking at ways to bring all our franchises to the PC, and you can expect to see different takes on our core console games on the PC in the coming years. We are still shipping physical media for our Fifa franchise this year but it’s the only franchise that still has that and that’s to accommodate the globalisation of our Fifa business which is obviously very strong, but there will come a day when all of our PC games franchises will be totally online and that’s probably not too far in the future.
What feedback have you had on sales of virtual goods, are there considerable revenues to be earned there?
It’s going to be a slower burn than normal, compared to our core games which have a huge launch and then drop off pretty radically by week three or four. With the open beta, you could earn dollars but it wasn’t real money. Today it’s full commercialisation. We’re watching the numbers of people who are signing up to subscribe – at $9.99 a month or $59.99 for a full year – and the early metrics off the server show that people are already subscribing on Day One and those are guys who had a good experience on the open beta.
The other slice of the business model is microtransactions so you can go in and buy clubs and other equipment, buy power-ups and individual courses and we have buckets of points that you can buy that will fuel that.
