EA Games Chief: Transmedia Entertainment Is About IP - via PSFK

On Monday EA Games president Frank Gibeau talked to us about the strategic direction of the company, as well as its disagreement with Activision over charging for social connectivity.

In today’s concluding section, he covers transmedia entertainment, the need for original games and the rise of digital. There’s also more on the company’s offensive against the Modern Warfare machine …

We’ve currently got this transmedia concept blooming – the idea that games are part of an entertainment package that includes “linear media” such as books and movies. Is this a serious part of the EA strategy, too?
The expansion into linear is more tactical than strategic for us. It’s about getting the intellectual property into more hands and exposing more people to it. If you do a film and it’s good, everybody has a great time, but it doesn’t change our value as a company.

What we have thought about differently though since last year is the idea of games as IP universes that then express themselves across different platforms. What’s really important is thinking about, say Need For Speed as an intellectual property – real cars, real fast – but you can play it as a free-to-play title on the PC, you can play it on a mobile device or a console, but they’re interoperable, they talk to each other. Because, on the server side, I know from your nucleus account how you registered, where you’re coming in from, what you like, what type of games you enjoy, how long you play, and other titles you’d potentially be interested in – and I can offer those up to you to opt into if you want.

So when you think of an IP universe you stop thinking about ‘what are my Xbox 360 sales?’ and you think about “how big is my worldwide audience?” Now, linear media plays a little bit of a role in there, because if you have a TV show or a comic, it expands the IP, but what happened with Need for Speed last year is far more interesting to me – we got Criterion in on the game, we put it out as Hot Pursuit, we grew the audience, grew the sales on console, but at the same time we launched Need for Speed Online as a free-to-play title and quickly had 5 million registered users. And what we found was, the majority of those users were new to NFS, because we could see if they’d ever check in with a nucleus account before. And our top markets were Russia and Brazil, where we don’t even sell packaged goods – they just get pirated!

via psfk.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales