Virtual Reality

We do a little bit of that now. For the most part any team can win on the day, but we use our engines as predictors of outcomes all the time. And not really to predict the outcome but to start a conversation... We simulated Tottenham vs. Arsenal ahead of the game and put the result on our Facebook page, and there's millions of people interacting with that and talking about that.

I would love to think that we could reach a point where our data was so pure we knew what Wayne Rooney was gonna do before he did.

So we're a way off from that, but certainly we're getting greater fidelity and greater authenticity in our data every year, and adding more and more traits to players. In the old days, each player would have 10 or 20 traits that governed how they operate, so you had this very regimented type of play. Today, we have over 100, not just traits, but tendencies - so, what would that player do in context? How does the player operate with three minutes to go when their team is losing and they're playing into a headwind? What happens?

We're now starting to put player traits and tendencies in a real physical world, and we're getting outcomes that are very, very dynamic. That's going to change the way people play the game.

Yes. It's legitimately large now [laughs].

NCAA, the biggest year. NHL, the biggest year. Madden is up. FIFA is up. It has been a very, very good year for EA Sports.

The EA Sports team as a whole is at a point where they accept the responsibility to make great games - you can't lose that fire in the belly. But we challenge them to start looking at other things: let's look at what Battlefield 3 is going to do and how big that launch is going to be; let's look at what Need For Speed has done with Autolog and asynchronous play and see what we can learn from it.

While we do a lot of things really well, there are other players in this industry and other industries that do tremendous things that we can learn from.

We're looking at where we can build the best games. For us, having breadth is important, but not to the detriment of building quality experiences, and while we do this as a passion the economics have to work. And the challenges around your rugbys and your crickets, unfortunately, mean that what it takes to build a 90-rated sports game is not something those markets can sustain right now.

And so our focus is football, and American football, and golf, and hockey, and absolutely basketball - we are investing big there to come out with a bang next year. And I look at other things like surfing, and fighting, and rugby, and cricket, where maybe the experience may end up being in a different context: maybe it's a social game, maybe it's an iPhone game, where the development budgets aren't in the $20, $30, $40 million plus bracket.

Because that's what it takes to deliver a quality experience, and that's why some of what you see from other developers doesn't match the FIFAs and the Maddens. It's hard to make the economics work.