Corporate
earnings calls can often be a fount of information and insight into a
videogame publisher's practices. Last month, during Electronic Arts'
earnings call for the quarter ended December 31st, 2007, CEO John
Riccitiello was asked by an analyst whether the company had gotten over
the hump as far as the challenges in developing for Playstation 3 were
concerned. Here's the exchange, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha:
Doug Creutz, Cowen & Company:
It seems to me one of the minor themes of last year was that a lot of
publishers had difficulty completing PS3 titles on time and I wondered
if you think that you are at the point now where the PS3 development
process has caught up to the 360 development process and we’re less
likely to see those kind of delays in 2008. Thanks.
John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts:
Not quite. There’s no doubt that Electronic Arts, along with many
publishers, had some challenges essentially meeting the technical
specifications effectively on the PlayStation 3. Games where we
essentially led development on the PS3 platform like Burnout, which is
doing very well in the market today, we had no issue at all. But in
circumstances where we either led with the Xbox 360 or we ran parallel
production, for the most part we are still experiencing some delay on
the PS3. It’s a little bit more challenging a developing environment
for us.
If the problem was sort of of a certain size as much as
nine months, it’s probably a third as great a problem today as it was
then, but there still remains some catching up to do on the engineering
side for the PS3.
Riccitiello's response suggests
that the best technical solution to the difficulties with EA published
titles--which ranged from Madden PS3 running at half the framerate as
Madden 360 to the PS3 version of Valve's Half-Life 2: The Orange Box
shipping weeks later than its 360 counterpart--is to lead development
on PS3. But does EA intend to mandate such a plan across its
collection of city-states? The answer is no. We emailed a follow-up to
EA vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown. Below is our
question, followed by his response:
On the
call, Riccitiello says that when EA leads development on PS3, as with
Burnout Paradise, you don't have product quality issues on the PS3 SKU.
But when you lead on 360/PC, or do straight simultaneous multiplatform
development, you tend to have problems with the PS3 SKU's quality. So
from an overall product quality perspective, it seems that EA should be
leading all development on PS3, but Xbox 360 still has an installed
base advantage, which means that from a Metacritic and revenue
perspective, the Xbox 360 SKU should be the priority.
My
question is this: given that there's an obvious tension between product
quality (which suggests that PS3 should be the lead SKU) and revenues
(which say that Xbox 360 should be the lead SKU), does EA plan to stay
the course and continue to lead console development on Xbox 360, or is
there a strategy in place with current and future greenlit projects to
make PS3 the lead SKU so as to bring up EA's overall product quality?
It's
hard to believe that EA would ever issue an edict commanding
development teams to lead on one platform. That's not how we work.
I
think John's comment was an observation about early development on a
new system--not a top-down policy command on platform choices. EA is
agnostic in how we chose a lead platform--Burnout Paradise led with the
PS3; others led with Xbox 360; and games like Playground and My Sims
are exclusive to the Wii. Dev teams make platform choices based on a
number of factors including installed base, technical spec, genre and
game mechanics. But don't underestimate consumer demand--if the team
thinks a particular group of gamers is going to be responsive to a game
or a feature, they'll make every effort to give players what they want.
