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Peter Moore - Part Two

The EA Sports president on accessibility of brand, Nintendo's marketing spend and communicating with consumers

GamesIndustry.biz But therefore its own titles... so isn't that a bit of a problem, because anybody releasing on those platforms has to contend with Nintendo's huge marketing spend?
Peter Moore

You know what? That's their prerogative. They spend a lot of money developing the platform, a lot of money marketing it. We get to take advantage of it, but all I can tell you is that they've been very supportive of what we've done with [EA Sports] Active, very supportive in recognising that we have the best software to achieve their objective - which is to get a strong start for the Wii Motion Plus - and they have the business maturity to say "We do have a game coming, but you know, your game looks really good and we're going to get behind it for you."

Shame on us if we don't take advantage of that, and they've been great partners so far.

GamesIndustry.biz Speaking of marketing, the way that consumers get their information around games - how have you seen that develop?
Peter Moore

We've changed radically the way in which we communicate with our consumers, not in the last five years, but in the last 18 months. We've traditionally taken a more measured approach to consumer communication during the development process.

There was the mentality - like a lot of developers had - that because we didn't have anything to say, we'd go quiet. "We're going dark," used to be the expression. There was no communication.

I think one of the things I learned a while back, getting involved with MMOs, was that the MMO developer has constant communication with their community - which of course they use for extensive beta testing and what have you.

As I sit here today I can tell you that every franchise development team has a blog, producers are encouraged to get on there and communicate. We just recently issued video cameras to our producers, so it's not just words - you can actually see them. They talk about what's going on. I'll post something on my blog about what's going on here, that we're at the Emirates Stadium, and this is why.

I think the community respects having faces behind these people - it gives us the ability to take your feedback in real time, and I think the other side as well is that the community gets to see it's challenging work that we do. It's very good work, but it's hard work. It humanises it - it's no longer the massive TV campaign when the game ships... we'll still do television, but it's just one spoke in the wheel of everything we do, and today's consumer expects that.

They expect to be spoken to, they expect to receive Tweets from whoever they're interested in, they expect people like me to have a blog, and they also expect to be able to talk to our development teams - regardless of how busy they are during the day.

If that's what they expect, they are the customer, and we have to find ways of delivering on that.

Peter Moore is president of EA Sports. Interview by Phil Elliott.

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