EA's Jens Uwe Intat - Part Two

That characterises our overall effort to combine two things - one is that we see a greater fragmentation, and at the same time polarisation, of our market.

Let's start with polarisation - if we look at the traditional part of our business, let's just take next-gen consoles and PC, we see strong brands taking an ever-increasing share of the market. So the top ten in 2009 had a higher percentage of the total market than 2008, which in turn had a higher percentage than 2007, and so on.

Brands like FIFA and Call of Duty, which were up for the crown for best-seller in the full calendar year in Europe, have sold ever-increasing numbers. So there's polarisation in terms of big franchises, which we're trying to address with our fewer bigger hits company strategy.

At the same time we see fragmentation in that people are using more and more different devices, and more types of games when playing. Ten years ago it was the PlayStation and the GameBoy, and now you have different handheld devices from first party, different consoles, the PC, you have mobile phones and iPhone... you have so many different devices.

Meanwhile on PC you have so many different types of games, with social network gaming being one of the most recent and certainly one of the biggest trends in that space. If you combine the two then we actually expect that you'll have a huge opportunity for strong franchises across all of those platforms by leveraging an individual platform's strengths for a specific game offering.

We'll see our strong franchises, like FIFA, Need for Speed, The Sims, played on multiple platforms going forward.

Well, the year's starting with four strong titles from us - Army of Two: 40th Day and Mass Effect 2 were in January. Next it's Dante's Inferno, and then in March we've got Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

That's four strong titles in the first quarter of the calendar year, so you bet we're confident that it's going to be a strong year overall. Certainly for ourselves.

That really depends a lot on the product portfolio of the individual publisher - if you're a company that has one big hit every three or four years, you'll still have a very high volatility in your revenue stream, obviously.

A company like ourselves with a pretty strong overall portfolio certainly has much less volatility, and I think together we have for quite some time actually been trying to spread those launches more across the year.

In the beginning it was borne out of necessity by titles slipping out of the Christmas quarter - so studios were targeting the Christmas quarter, but then weren't able to finish the product. Meanwhile we're actually very good at holding our launch dates internally - so on one hand product quality at EA has become better over the last couple of years, while our ability to hit the originally targeted street date becomes better and better.

So we're able to deliberately able to spread products better over the year, and I think other publishers actually do more too in order to allow people to buy more games, have more time to play them, and more money to buy them over time rather than just in two or three months of the year.

First of all, I totally agree that World of Warcraft has been a very impressive product success in the last several years. It has a very strong and loyal community.

Secondly I agree that quite a few companies, including ourselves with Warhammer Online, have tried to dethrone the game with different approaches - all trying to have some innovation on gameplay in order to lure players away from World of Warcraft.

The reason why I'm much more confident in Star Wars being able to do that then Warhammer, for example, is that while Warhammer has been a very interesting product from a games point of view, I think the Star Wars franchise has such a huge fanbase across the planet that people being able to play that as an MMO... it will be a totally different reason for buying than just buying another massively multiplayer online game.

We do feel that the title has a very strong proposal, and we're very confident that it will be super-successful.

Yes, that's correct - the reason we're actually confident that we will be able to do that is because the studio building that, BioWare, is one of the most experienced at building longer-term franchises. If you look at Dragon Age, with its DLC plan for additional content being delivered over time to keep the game fresh, there's a lot of experience in retaining a user base.