EA's Sean Decker
The head of the publisher's LA studio talks PC gaming, the RTS genre, and why not everyone likes multiplayer
I've been in the games industry for 15 years and I've never seen it not change. If you're successful, you're grow and if you're not, you won't. That's really what it comes down to, and we're happy with the size that we are now, and happy with the games we're making.
If things get better and we do well, we'll probably grow... and if not, we won't.
Yeah, it's a bit like the music industry when it comes to CD sales and all the rest of it. There are still a lot of those out there, but it's shifting, and that's all there is to it. With DICE, Battlefield: Heroes is an example, it's really all about finding the way the customer wants to get the games they want to play - that's all it comes down to.
If they want to be at home and download it? Great. If they want to get it from a store? Great. We need to be at those different places with those ways. I think the PC market... I'm a huge bleeding-edge guy, and I love gadgets, and I think digital distribution in whatever form it takes will happen. Will it happen tomorrow? No, but I think that's the way most people will eventually get their games.
Even the console - look at it, they're doing games on demand right now, and I think there's a good market to be had for many years in packaged goods on PC... but eventually it will go online.
It's just shifting - the money is moving from one place on the PC to another place on the PC. Digital revenue is continuing to grow year after year for everybody. The MMO space, the MSG space, places like Pogo - they do fantastically well, and there's the entire Asian market that's almost exclusively PC as well.
So yeah, it's completely overblown.
I think it's a little bit of both - there are some fantastic studios out there that have been making from great RTS games, and I think that Command & Conquer has consistently put out great quality year after year. I think you'll continue to see that, and whether it's on console or PC, it really goes back to where the consumer wants to get their experience from.
RTS is a great market and I think it will continue to be so - and I think that some of our competitors are coming out with great titles as well. The more people that are interested in and play RTS games, it's great for us.
I think that there have been a lot of good attempts at it, but nobody's gotten to that place where they've got it. I think the biggest barrier that it faces is the real-time in it, as well as the space... to be able to control multiple things across space you can't necessarily see on your screen - that's always been the big issue, and there's never been the perfect solution that everybody's gone to.
I think you'll continue to see people attempt to do it.
Well, go back to the FPS point - eventually somebody did, so I think it'll happen.