Frank Gibeau, label president of EA Games

In Part I of our Q&A with Electronic Arts' Frank Gibeau, label president for EA Games, we talked about his priorities for the new division, where licensed products fit into his strategy, and how he planned to take on Activision/Infinity Ward and their Call of Duty franchise. In the second and final part of our interview, we discuss whether EA may have too many shooters in its pipeline, how the company can thrive under the long shadows cast by Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV, and what his intentions are towards the Wii given the announcement of a separate EA Casual division.

Coming back to Call of Duty--sorry, to Medal of Honor; your competition at Infinity Ward is not doing a World War II game this year--is there a potential of World War II fatigue setting in amongst the audience. There's been a lot of derision aimed at Midway's World War II entry, Hour of Victory. How do you combat that with Airborne? Can you capture the innovation that you're talking about in Medal of Honor: Airborne in a thirty-second spot, and is that enough? What do you need to do to signal to people that this is something different, that it's worth their time and money, that it's not just another World War II game?

Again, it comes down to the gameplay innovation, right? The category gets tired when the games start to feel all the same. With regards to Medal of Honor, the focus on the airborne jump and the ability to land anywhere in the level, we believe sets it up for some innovative and addictive game play that feels fresh. If it felt like prior Medal of Honors or felt like, you know, the Ubi game or the Midway game or even Call of Duty we wouldn't be successful and it would feel like another tired entry.

Our bet is on innovating in the gameplay by giving you a different way to play. Whenever we look at a category, we definitely think about concept, but we also know that you have to nail the tech, you have nail the game play and you need to nail the concept in order to get a hit. When you just nail one or the other, you end up being one of the pack, and this is a category that, frankly, needs some innovation and some new thinking. Our hope with Airborne is that by allowing you to start anywhere and to play the game out that way, we've uncovered something that will make the brand feel fresh again.

With the sheer number of shooters that you guys have coming out this year--first- and third-person; internal to EA, and from EA Partners--is it starting to feel like you guys have a bunch of your own pit bulls amped up for a fight with one another? How do you distinguish among all those games?

Well, the good news it that it's embarrassment of riches. If you look at each game, they all have tremendous creativity and innovation in them. I think it becomes a task for us to figure out how to stage them so we don't saturate the market and that we leverage windows in the marketplace.

Again, that's part of the promise of this new structure that we're moving to: by bringing development and publishing together in a single unit, that this could be a much more thoughtful and forward-looking process. So from our perspective, we're not going to ship them all in the same day. We're going to look for windows; we're going to stage them; we're going to look at where the competition's coming; and we're going to air traffic control how we bring these things to market. Clearly, you don't want to have six shooters shipping in the same day across two different companies and we're cognizant of that. And frankly, some of it has to do with how the games are final-ing and does one game need more time, or is it right on the mark? We'll make each of those decisions as we move through it.

What's your take on the external competition you're facing in the shooter arena? Obviously, the 800-pound gorilla in the power suit is Master Chief in Halo 3. So not just looking at the single player game, not just looking at the raw sales, but how concerned are you about a repeat of what happened with Halo 2, which just inhaled Xbox owners' online time. They weren't playing that much else online. So with online being a key component of all of the shooters you guys are shipping this year, is there anything you're thinking of specifically, whether it's marketing, whether it's promotions or something else to pry away some of that online audience on the Xbox 360--which currently has the biggest online install base and the most online activity--to get them to play your games online?

Well, your insight is correct. We arrived at the same conclusion when we've gone back and looked at Murderers' Rows in the past: Halo 2 came out, established a huge market and did eat up a whole bunch of online time. Same is true of World of Warcraft on the PC and the same was true, frankly, of [Grand Theft Auto] San Andreas on the PS2. It was like what, a 100‑hour long game? And so what we found was that for a few weeks after the release everybody in the United States was C.J. and nobody else was looking at other stuff.

Now what's really cool about our line-up though is that we've got some very competitive games online like Hellgate and Crysis. They're on a different platform; they're not in a head‑to‑head fight with 360. So when you're looking at the 800-pound Master Chief, we've got a battle suit in Crysis, we've got demons underneath London in Hellgate and they're on different platforms. Also, on a global level, if you look at how Microsoft's positioned in Europe, the PC business is pretty vibrant and powerful for us there versus the 360 business. We're thinking globally and we're thinking about China, we're thinking about Europe in the same sentence as we're thinking about the North American console market. And when you look at the broader opportunities, things like Hellgate can have a tremendous amount of success globally, in Asia, Europe and North America at the same time that Master Chief finds his market in North America. Same thing with Crysis.

I'm not going to say that that Halo 3 won't have an impact on the industry. It certainly will. But from my perspective, I think that it's key to find gaps in the marketplace that you can go after at the time that the gorilla's coming out. They can't be everywhere. And then, when it dies down, you release new product that goes after that market. The other thing about Murderers' Rows is they grow markets. They'll be bringing in new users that, after a period of time, are going to be ready for the next thing and that's when we want to stage things like Army of Two, Mercenaries 2 and other franchises that might appeal to that customer, but not necessarily hitting them on whatever day Halo 3 comes out in September.

Now turning to the Steven Spielberg projects, which EA LA general manager Neil Young described as a creative partnership. Do you look at this as just a standalone deal, where you say "Spielberg's the top of his field, EA's the top of its field, let's bring them together"? Or do you look at this as a template, should it succeed, for the way that EA might re-engineer its approach to Hollywood? Because since I've been covering EA, it seems that the way that EA has approached Hollywood has been re-jiggered a number of times.

Yeah, I think that's right. I also might turn around instead and say Hollywood's been approaching videogames in lots of interesting ways too. What we have with Steven Spielberg is incredibly special and is a unique thing unto itself. Whether or not we develop relationships with other creators of entertainment is going to be happening whether or not--well, in addition to what we're doing with Steven Spielberg. I see it as a new, innovative way of creating entertainment that appeals to a large audience and if we can find other folks like Steven or even very different than Steven Spielberg we will do that. This is a very ripe time for experimentation creatively. Given the number of platforms and the number of different ways you can develop games there's a lot of talent out there that, frankly, our company wants to start partnering with and figure out new ways to innovate and bring out games.

That sounds a little boilerplate but it's actually true in terms of how we started to think about Dead Space and what type of ways can we make a horror experience even more interesting. Guess what? There's a lot of people making exceptional horror experiences in the linear world, what can we do to start to partner there? That's just an example. But there are multiple examples like that that I think will lead to success and I don't think one shoe fits all. I think a lot of it has to do with how the particular individual thinks about creative and how they create entertainment. The way that you work with Steven Spielberg is going to be very different than the way that you would work with somebody else. So, from that perspective, I think directionally it's correct. Whether or not it's a template, I'm not sure.

If you had to pick the biggest fight that you have on your hands this holiday, would you say that it's Medal of Honor versus Call of Duty; would you say that it's, you know, another one of your shooters, maybe Half-Life 2: The Orange Box versus Halo 3; or would you say it's Rock Band versus Guitar Hero III?

I think it's all of them, We're bringing equal vigor and focus and a desire to win to all of them. I mean, in all candor, what we've been joking about around here is that we want to be the biggest murderers on Murderers' Row. We want to be Babe Ruth in that line-up. When you look at all of those things we feel really fired up about Rock Band. We also feel really good about The Simpsons and we feel really good about our sports line‑up this year. We're going to have a hell of a fight in basketball.

So, I mean, there's multiple places where competition really does bring the best out of EA. We've got a new CEO who's got a lot of fire in the belly for winning, so we're bringing a lot of stuff to bear this holiday. Not any one of them stands out as more important than the others, because we also have some fresh, new introductions that don't have direct competition but they're going to be fighting for entertainment time and dollars versus some other big hitters.

You and I have talked before about the fact that EA, somewhat unfairly, gets a bad rap for not innovating. You guys have a lot of new IP that's bee coming out, but where the reputation comes from is that, you have a lot of games that sequel on an annual basis. Obviously that's a great business, but when you look how much it costs to make a game, how much it costs to market a game, how convinced are you that in a lot of places where EA has been sequeling on an annual basis--with games like Need For Speed and others--that you can have meaningful innovation on a 12‑month cycle?

You start the annual cycle by having teams in pre-production the prior year that are different than the team that's nailing the game that year. Need for Speed operates on kind of a one-and-a-half- to two-team effort. So when you see ProStreet this year, it's got a completely different take on where Need For Speed has been, and that was largely the result of a pre-production team that had been working in parallel to [to last year's Need For Speed] Carbon. And by the way, there's10 million people out there globally that find that franchise to be very innovative and very fresh.

That's not to say that we don't have good years and bad years on some of these franchises. That happens to the best of us inside this industry. You have to constantly look at the pipeline, keep it fresh, keep it innovative and when you look at what we're going to be doing this year and the year after it, the lineup's pretty powerful and it's much better than the prior year. We've had some lean years in the past but I really like our chances. I really like our portfolio. The teams are really innovating in multiple categories.

At the end of the day, when you look at something like Spore, it just bleeds innovation. It's hard to say EA isn't innovative when it built the Sims; it built Spore; it established the [car] tuner game as a category with Need For Speed; the original World War II category with Medal of Honor; Battlefield with its multiplayer. I could go on and on but there's a lot of ways that you can look at EA and I tend to look at it from that perspective. That's why I stuck around, that's why I like this place, that's why I really want to prove the doubters wrong and continue to produce some great stuff. I really like what we have coming out in '08 and I like what we have coming out in '09.

The last question is about the Wii. EA Casual group is going to be taking some of that portfolio. How are you going to approach the Wii in your group? There's a lot of concern from gamers that there are a lot of mini-game collections and not much else, especially from third parties. What approach are you guys going to take to the Wii to speak to EA's core consumer?

If you look at epics like Zelda and some of the other things that are out on Wii that are about a story and a character and a challenge and a quest, I definitely think that there's going to be a market for that as it matures. The beauty is that it's an expanding market, it's very fast growth and there's going to be a lot of desire and demand for those deeper experiences once everybody gets past the mini-games. There'll still be a place for that, but I do believe we can carve out experiences that start with the controller and thinking though how we develop a character, tell a story and have a really great interactive entertainment experience from the controller out that is epic. There will be that market segment on the Wii and we'll definitely be approaching it that way.

Now what we will be designing that from the controller out, that's a very different notion than how you might approach a 360 game, where you might think deeper about the Live experience. That's one of the challenges, obviously, in next gen development is that the platforms are a lot more different than they have been in the past. It also gives you more opportunities to build unique experiences, but you have to think about it early enough and at the right time in order to get the right leverage and to get the right ideas.

When we think about Wii games we think about it from the controller out. We think that stories and epics will have a place on that platform--Zelda being the perfect example--but it's going to require us to think about it differently. You probably won't see as many epics coming up from our group on the Wii as you will on other platforms. That's not to say that the Wii is not important to EA as a company, because EA Sports, EA Casual group and EA Sims, in addition to ours, will be supporting the Wii in a major way. Our intention is to be a significant player on that platform.

Great, Frank. Thanks for very much for your time and good luck on the new gig.

Okay, thank you.