Electronic Arts: Making Up for Missteps

Increasingly, licensors are increasing restrictions on what you can do, how you can treat the properties, your ability to build a great game for the consumer. You know, their requirements for marketing guarantees and additional tie-ins for a license. So, at some point, there are some licensors that are just great to work with, and, of course, there are some that are just really hard to work with.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata's critique of the video-game industry is that developers and hardware makers are too worried about making games that look great and aren't spending enough time worrying about making them fun to play. How do you respond to that?

I think what we're proving, and what the industry's proving, is they both can be right. On the one hand, Nintendo has done a phenomenal job of broadening the market with innovative game-play. You've really got to hand it to them. At the same time, you're seeing Microsoft and Sony be fairly successful -- and us be successful as well -- on great-looking games. Because the consumers do value graphics as well as [game-play].

There [have] been countless games in our industry that have looked great and didn't play particularly well. Going forward, there's going to be a lot of me-too products that look great -- because they all look great -- that aren't necessarily going to do great. But if you take a look at what we have -- you know, Spore is innovative game-play, and at the same time it's got great graphics. And I think that's what really knocks it out of the park.

Innovative game-play helps drive [the cause] of gaming. And if you can do that, and you can have great graphics, I think that the market is bigger than just having one of the two.