Kathy Vrabeck, president of EA Casual

It was just this February when Electronic Arts announced that its former president, John Riccitiello, would be returning to the company as CEO after a two-and-a-half year absence. Yesterday, Riccitiello officially put his stamp on EA with the unveiling of the company's reorganization into four divisions, topped by the four following label presidents:

• EA Games: to be headed by current executive vice president and general manager of North American publishing Frank Gibeau. This includes such franchises as Spore, Battlefield, Burnout and Medal of Honor.
• EA Sports: to be supervised by executive vice president of legal and business affairs Joel Linzner until a permanent candidate can be found. This includes such licensed sports titles as Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL.
• EA Sims: to be directed by the current chief of EA's Sims studio, Nancy Smith. This includes The Sims, SimCity and MySims, among other properties.
• EA Casual: to be captained by Kathy Vrabeck, former president of publishing for Activision. This includes EA Mobile and Pogo.

We spoke with Vrabeck shortly after her appointment was announced, but before yesterday's reorganization was unveiled. Here's what she had to say about her fledgling EA Casual division.

First of all, congratulations on your new job.

Thank you. I'm excited about it.

How did conversations with you and EA begin about a) your coming onboard with EA, and then b) you heading up EA Casual?

As you know, I left Activision over a year ago. About a year ago, in June, I started doing a little bit of consulting for EA in their mobile group. So, you know, from that time I started getting to know the EA folks a little better and just getting to know their businesses, but we really didn't have any firm discussions about me joining the company until John Riccitiello came back. I had gotten to know John over the last year or two in his role at Elevation Partners. Although we both had similar backgrounds, we had not met during our videogame days. I spent a lot of time talking with him at Elevation about how you think about videogame companies. And when he came back in and he started meeting with folks at EA and thinking about how he would attack some of the growth parts of the business he called me, we had lunch, and we started talking about his thoughts on EA and whether there was a role for me to play.

I sort of jumped at the casual opportunity for a couple of reasons. One, I think the world of John. I think that he's going to come back into EA and really propel it forward. I think he's going to be doing a lot that will make the whole industry think about how they run their businesses. So I'm excited to work with John. I did spend a fair amount of time looking at what I might want to do next after I left Activision, and had pretty much decided that I would likely not work in games because I wanted to do something that was a little bit different than what I had done. I actually looked at many opportunities outside of gaming and what attracted me to this is that it's enough rooted in what I know, but it's really the next big thing in gaming. It's where I personally think the growth is going to be. It's really fun. It's the kind of games that I relate to a little bit more. So for all those reasons, I was excited about taking the job.

How are you defining casual games? What's going to be coming under your bailiwick?

Well, we've not--and I think you can appreciate this--we've not externally communicated everything that's coming under my group because we're still in the process of talking to folks internally. As you can imagine, we don't want people to find out through the press that they're going to be working in the group; we'd like them to find out first from their boss.

I've been working on a definition, because if I don't put something down on paper it's interesting how many rumors start just floating around. It's not going to be platform specific. There's been some comments internally like "Oh, well, all the Wii products go here." No, there's going to be other groups that do Wii products. The only platform specific group in the company that will be in Casual is the mobile group, because we're sort of viewing the category of mobile games as casual, even if they're core franchises or appeal to core gamers, because it's still a casual experience.

We've also--I think you can imagine that some of the online gaming stuff and Xbox Live Arcade; things like Pogo; some of the kid's franchises; I mean, there's lots of things that we view as casual because I'm starting to define casual by the consumers that it targets, rather than any kind of graphics quality or the specific platform.

As you're working on the definition, how would you describe the casual gaming consumer?

One of the things I want to do is get my new team together and help me fine-tune this, and find our space. But I really think it's about consumers who don't sort of self-identify as core video gamers. So for sure that's kids. I think we can, for the most part, put middle-aged women in that group, the group that goes online to play Pogo and games like that. But I also think it can be experiences for core gamers that are more casual in nature, like mobile gaming.

You know, I spent some time the other night reading a bunch of stuff online about casual gaming and one of the blogs said, "If your mom can play it, it's a casual game," and I thought what is that like? That's probably the ultimate "Your mama" joke from a core gamer. There will be some things in the game play about accessibility and bursts of play activity that you'll see in casual games, but I don't think it's going to be defined by the games as much as it will be defined by the consumer.

How much does the duration of a gameplay session tie into your definition of casual?

I don't think it defines casual. Part of that will play into it, but it's less about--I mean, 'cause some of what I would consider very casual game players can spend 40 minutes playing Tetris or other casual games. You can be on an airplane and play Solitaire forever. So it's not about necessarily how long you play. I think about it as in a short period of time, you can get a satisfying experience. It's not something that you are going to have to spend hours and hours and hours to feel like you've accomplished something.

I'm not into mobile games myself, because a lot of the games have been console and PC hand-me-downs. One of the things that has struck me for some time is the similarity between many of the games being made for mobile phones and games that are being made for Xbox Live Arcade and PSN [Playstation Network]. But whenever I would raise that point with publishers--not just at EA with its separate Pogo and mobile divisions, but with other companies as well--it was clear that their small games groups and their mobile games groups were separate divisions. Why do you think its taken publishers so long to see the synergies between those mobile games and small games?

My guess is that many companies organize around a distribution strategy or a distribution capability. There's also not been a lot of the core videogame companies that have mobile gaming groups who have fully thought through this. But I'm with you. I think the development is similar, the gameplay patterns are similar. It may or may not be a different consumer, but they're more similar than not, exactly as you're pointing out. My guess is that it's because companies have organized around distribution. If you're selling the games to the carriers versus selling the games through Live Arcade, that's been two separate groups historically. I'd say that, and the fact that most of the core videogame companies have not had big mobile efforts.

Ubisoft announced last month that they were forming a casual games division. Is this EA announcement a reaction to what Ubisoft is doing, or was this already in the works?

This was already in the works. This is something that John had been noodling around for some time. Even as a executive over the last year who's been talking to folks about opportunities; casual gaming, a lot of people were talking about it. A lot of people think it's the big growth area for games, whereas Ubisoft just had an announcement out first. I don't think that necessarily implies that they were thinking about it or working on it first.

Everyone says that their "Come to Jesus" moment on the Wii was last year at E3. But whether it was Activision, EA or the rest of the publishers in the industry, it seems as though only Ubisoft recognized that there was really strong potential with the Wii and developed a slew of games for it: some exclusive stuff and a number of ports--some of which weren't very good and weren't very well reviewed--but they definitely put a lot of resources behind it. Why do you think that EA and other publishers were slow to recognize the potential of the Wii?

I'm not sure that Ubi put any more resources against it than they did anything else. Ubi took what I would consider a bet against all the platforms. They wanted to have stuff at launch. They did very well with the Xbox 360 launch too. I think they just said "Oh, it's a new product, I'm going to put stuff on it," not necessarily that they had a different view of the Wii's potential success than anybody else. So I wouldn't characterize it like that.

I wasn't at EA at the time to know what drove kind of their thinking, but I can tell you that there's a ton of great stuff that's going to be coming out on the Wii from EA. As an industry--analysts, newspapers, magazines, everyone--we were all a little surprised at how big the install base got so rapidly. I mean, that was a surprise. That is not typical a historical Nintendo launch. It was coming out in the face of Playstation, which has been the clear leader for the last two platform launches. As you know, the bigger companies tend to look at their resources against the install base and plan accordingly and say "We'll have a few things out at launch and then we'll really put our stuff out when we think the install base will be bigger." I think EA is going to be incredibly well-positioned this summer and fall to take advantage of the great job Nintendo did.

In the press release announcing both the formation of EA Casual and your appointment, Harry Potter on the Wii and NFL '08 on the mobile phone were thrown out there as examples of casual games. You've already mentioned that mobile will be coming under your group. Are the Potter games coming under your group?

You know, that's one of those things that I can't confirm right now because until we tell every group internally where they're going, we don't want it to come out through the press.

Okay. Can you tell us whether EA Casual will be a cross-divisional initiative with a dual-reporting structure, or will entire teams and studios be coming under EA Casual?

What the press release stated and what folks have picked up on, is that this is just the first announcement that John has made and that we'll likely see more changes. The goal would be that for franchises that are managed entirely within Casual, those teams would have only one reporting line. There will certainly be a transition period as projects close down in the next couple of months and new ones get started up. But people can expect to only have one single reporting relationship.

Looking at Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and the Nintendo Virtual Console, I'm hearing conflicting things from developers about how lucrative it is right now to make games for Xbox Live Arcade. People seem to be doing well in terms of just porting old NES and SNES games on the Nintendo Virtual Console and things like that. But as far as original stuff, I'm hearing very mixed reports. Obviously, Microsoft is very bullish and says that Live Arcade games are doing really well. But I'm hearing other people who are saying like, that it's still actually kind of tough to make money. What's your take?

You know what, this is where I'm going to have to claim a little bit of ignorance. I have only a couple of days being back in the saddle.

Still studying it?

Yeah. In fact, I've got some meetings set up next week to get a refresher course on how some of these platforms have evolved since I technically left the industry. So I really don't have a comment on the profitability of these platforms.

How much do you think this expanded audience and the casual games expansion is going to be driven by women and girls, and how much is the female audience going to be the focus of EA Casual?

I haven't laid out specific strategies around women or girls or anything like that. There's going to be a focus around kids, for sure. There's going to be a focus around the folks who like 10- and 15-minute gaming experiences. There's going to be a focus around online casual gaming. And it's going to be a global group. All the great casual stuff that's going on in Asia right now, for instance, will be a focus. I don't know enough yet to know if that's all being driven by men or women over there, and we'll sort through that. But I think what this group will be doing is that anyone who wants to play casual games is going to get offerings from us. That will mean it will be more female-oriented than traditional gaming. It will be more kid-oriented than traditional gaming. But I don't--it's not like I've set up a group right now to target women and girls.

You mentioned overseas markets. There seems to be a lot of interesting stuff going on abroad, particularly in Asian markets. Is one of the aims of the group the acquisition of distribution rights for massively multiplayer games from other markets, particularly those that follow a micro-transaction model and things like that? Is that going to be one of your objectives, to pick up North America distribution rights for those types of games?

I'm not sure that that's the objective as much as it is--I mean, we're going to do what's right for casual gamers in North America. But I also want to build a presence of casual gaming in Asia and as you know, most people have found that the North American content hasn't been traveling over there well. So we're going to have to do something that's local from a content perspective over there. If there are games that can come over here, we'll obviously want to take a look at 'em, but, I'm a big believer that to build a global business, you have to do it locally.

Last question. In the past there was an EA Kids division and it didn't last. It went away. What is the--

I didn't actually know that.

Apparently there was. Some big publishers have tried educational games in the past and subsequently been forced to get out of that business, because the returns weren't there. How do you envision EA targeting kids? Does that mean more licenses, more original games, or something else entirely?

Again, with just four days now under my belt in the job, what I'm going to be doing for my summer vacation is spending time setting out the vision for EA Casual, and I think we'll be able to talk more about that in the fall once that's been better articulated. But we'll do what we think is best for kids' entertainment. We know kids are highly influenced by licenses and we know that the parents that buy games for them are highly influenced by licenses. But you also see all this great stuff that's been going in the kids' market that has been original, like Club Penguin, the places that people are going online to play really short, casual games. The kids all know these websites. They go there and play a two-minute game of tossing a ball or doing something funny. And that's very much going to be within my group's charter.

And the absolute last question. What was the last casual game that you played?

What was the last casual game that I played?

Yeah.

Well, I played Bejeweled on my phone yesterday. But I have a nine-year old son and we have spent an inordinate amount of time since he got a Wii over the holidays playing all of the Wii Sports games.

Great. Well, Kathy, thanks very much for taking the time to speak with me.

Good to talk to you again.

And I look forward to hearing the announcement of your vision.

All right, thanks.