EA's Jens Uwe Intat - Part Two
The European publishing boss on 2010 releases and challenging WoW
In part one of our exclusive interview with Electronic Arts' European publishing boss, Dr Jens Uwe Intat, we covered an appraisal of 2009 - both in terms of the company's performance, plus how the industry picture developed overall.
Here in part two we look ahead to what 2010 will bring, and ask whether spreading releases throughout the year will benefit the games business in the longer term and if Star Wars: The Old Republic can mount a real challenge to Blizzard's World of Warcraft.
I think what we'll see going forwards is that all publishers, including ourselves, will spread launches more throughout the year - and we're certainly benefiting from our form of entertainment being much more established.
It's more mass market and people are more used to playing games, so the market's not just about Christmas when traditionally there was a lot of attention on videogames. These days people play all year round, so if you develop a strong title you can certainly launch it any time of the year.
The two titles you mentioned are really good examples - The Sims 3, which is a blockbuster franchise and certainly one of the strongest titles that we have in the company, launched extraordinarily well in the Summer, and did even better compared to the launch of The Sims 2 over a similar time frame... so we're certainly happy with that.
And we were also able to launch a new IP in EA Sports Active in late Spring/early Summer as opposed to a traditional Christmas launch.
Overall there are more games sold in the last quarter of the calendar year, and there probably always will be - particularly with a view to the Christmas business and all the gifting going on - but for a good, strong title there's no reason why it can't be launched in any month in the year.
The only exception I'd make to that is for Europe in August, when Southern Europe is completely closed and the rest of Europe is partially on vacation.
Well, obviously supermarkets in the UK have identified videogames as a traffic builder with a particularly interesting price offering - and by the way I think the UK is now the only country in Europe in which you're allowed to sell a product below your own cost of goods... that's not even legally possible in other countries.
That's certainly a challenge for the specialist retailers because they can't even try to compete on pricing - what they'll probably do going forwards is, if we look at what happened to the book industry a couple of years ago when they had a similar threat from supermarkets and other kinds of retailers, is to focus even more on the consumer relationship.
They understood their consumers better both online and offline, and were overall in a better place to service them - and I'd expect the same from the games specialists, particularly with our product moving more and more into the online space. I think they'll have a very nice role to play there.
I'd expect the digital-delivered portion of our business to grow - it will certainly take an ever-increasing part of our overall business. But at the same time I'd still expect packaged goods to be around for a very long time. It's still the starting point of that whole journey into an individual game.
I still expect that most games will start with people buying a disc and then downloading additional content - because we've seen that in other areas there's a certain number of people that like to buy online, but there are still a lot of people that prefer to go to a store for purchasing product.
I think our product lends itself more to digital distribution than books, for example - although with e-readers they may go in that direction too. But retailers still have an important role advising people which games to purchase, and so on.
So digital, while continuing to grow, will still not be the majority of our business for quite some time.