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EA's Jens Uwe Intat

The European VP talks about the region's market, mature games on the Wii, and the iPhone's importance

The next six months will be an important time for Electronic Arts, with a difficult start to the year evidenced by its recent lukewarm financial results - but as the company's press conference at Gamescom pointed out, there's a host of key titles set for release in the run-up to Christmas and beyond.

Here, European VP Dr Jens Uwe Intat talks about business in the region, the increasing role of the iPhone in games, and why Dead Space Extraction could be the last mature game the company makes for the Wii.

GamesIndustry.biz What have you noticed about the European market in the past twelve months?
Dr Jens Uwe Intat

Well, we did see the first half of the calendar year in Europe as slightly shrinking, so the packaged goods market itself was down about 10 per cent - that's excluding online, which isn't really properly surveyed yet.

For the second half this year we actually assume that it will be stronger than last year, so we're still expecting the total market to be stable.

GamesIndustry.biz It's certainly been an interesting landscape, with consumer spending changing shape.
Dr Jens Uwe Intat

Yes, and we would actually expect that - the Sony PlayStation 3 price cut will help to grow the installed base of hardware, which is still a little bit behind the last console cycle. At the same point the last time around we had an installed base of roughly 125 million, while this time around we have ballpark 75 million.

So fuelling that growth of the installed base of consoles by reducing the price is actually certainly something that should help us, particularly in this financial environment.

We've not seen a reluctance of people to buy software yet, but we've obviously seen a reluctance of people buying consoles, which you could certainly say is an entry barrier - or entry ticket - into higher software sales. So that should help.

GamesIndustry.biz We'll wait to see what the consumer spending is like over the Holiday season, but do you expect it to balance out a bit more between the three main platforms now? How do you see it changing in the next 12 months?
Dr Jens Uwe Intat

We actually do see that, particularly with consoles, they'll get closer to each other in terms of software sales - but still Nintendo Wii has the highest installed base by far. But due to a lower attach rate, compared to Xbox 360 and PS3 we can see that both of the latter are getting much closer to the Wii - so that becomes a much more balanced play, yes.

GamesIndustry.biz The installed base for the Wii is fantastic, but how do you see that user base engaging with the console on an ongoing basis - who is the demographic that EA targets with Wii games?
Dr Jens Uwe Intat

I don't think you should underestimate the number of people who really try to have very demanding games on the Wii. It's certainly true that Nintendo has bought new audiences into gaming, with the driver being a combination of more intuitive to use interfaces - away from the traditional controller that's not really intuitive to a 50 year old person, to the more intuitive Wii Remote.

But secondly also, the games are also appealing to people who don't want to spend hours and hours to master a game, but really enjoy playing it.

I think they brought new people into gaming, but the sheer amount of consumers on the Wii is not just explained by new consumers - they still have core players, and for those people we have to still continue to develop demanding games.

What we're actually trying to do is address both of those, so we're developing games like Tennis, or Tiger, where we're using Wii MotionPlus, in which you can really master that game over time - that's for people that are interested in more demanding gameplay, it takes longer to master.

Secondly we have to find either new target groups and/or new opportunities for existing target groups - one example for EA is EA Sports Active, where we're trying to use the general lifestyle and health trend in order to create new opportunities for people to play games on the Wii.

I'd also add to that point that we're expecting the Sony motion controller and Microsoft Natal should also open the space for new consumers on one hand, and new gaming opportunities for existing ones that should help to broaden the market overall.