Better Know Peter MooreIndustryGamers is proud to present the latest in our ongoing "Better Know" series, which gets a more personal look at some of the games industry's biggest names. EA COO Peter Moore has become of the more popular industry figures, having overseen launches of both Sega's Dreamcast and Microsoft's Xbox 360. He moved on to join EA Sports and now is helping to guide all of Electronic Arts as Chief Operating Officer.
We spoke with Moore about how he got involved in games, what his experiences were like at Sega and Microsoft, and what the future of the industry will look like.
IndustryGamers: At what point did you know you wanted to work in the games industry? What was so appealing to you?
Peter Moore: I think the first time I really got involved in playing a platform was Sega's Saturn, which I bought my son. And I always remember it was $500. And 18 months later I couldn't find any games for it, and I was puzzled, to say the least. We all know the background of the Saturn. But when I was at Reebok, I was looking to head back West – I'd had enough of New England winters (my family came to the Bay Area before we moved to Boston). I had a complete career before this, much longer than my video game career, in athletic footwear and apparel. It started to feel old and jaded, and I was feeling the battle was lost against Nike – and it clearly was at that time – and I was fascinated by the concept of entertainment going online, and Sega had reached out to me and talked about an online games console.
I had to wrap my head around what that would mean. I took a leap of faith – I had to move my family back 2500 miles and entered an industry at 40 something years of age that I really knew nothing about. But I was fascinated by the opportunity. It really felt like technology as much as entertainment, particularly with the online element of it. And the moment I arrived at Sega (late January 1999) I knew I was in the right place and in the right industry. Maybe not with the right console at that time – but right place, right industry, and I've never looked back. I've loved every minute of it and continue to do so.
IG: You've done a lot in this business, working for Sega, Xbox, and now EA. What are you most proud of?
PM: In both Sega and Microsoft hardware was involved, and I shall never forget the moment when [we launched]. It's almost like [having a child], not that I would know anything about giving birth, but I've been there. When you work hard to create a positioning for a platform, you go through all the technical challenges, you build the marketing, you identify what games need to be there at launch, and what the trends are – and in both the case of the Dreamcast and the Xbox 360, I will never forget those moments when we kind of unleashed it on the world. I remember unleashing Xbox 360 in Hollywood; we convinced MTV to do a 30-minute special and you might remember it – Elijah Wood was there. It seems like it was a lifetime ago now, but it was a tremendous amount of work in doing that. And then perhaps equally if not more importantly, we did Zero Hour in the Palmdale desert. And again, it was an idea I had to give back to the community and let them get their hands on it. We took over a hangar and invited 5,000 gamers to come play Xbox 360 for 24 hours.
And then here at EA, there have been so many [moments] from my job in EA Sports where every year we deliver world class sports entertainment and our ability to be able to do that and achieve the quality ratings we've done in recent years. Every time a game ships, at Monday night at midnight-ish we're always watching and looking around whether it's Madden or FIFA or NHL or Tiger Woods or NCAA Football – those are moments of great pride. Maybe they're not the huge moments that a console launch is, but they come frequently here at EA. We had Battlefield 3 and Need for Speed, and I was just in a meeting for launch plans on Star Wars: The Old Republic. These are exciting meetings and this is very cool stuff – I have a great job!
In the last few weeks, it's been Battlefield 3 versus Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3... and there are always big moments. It's this constant cadence we have here at EA, which I actually didn't have at Sega and Microsoft, of big launches coming almost weekly that has a great level of excitement. And then when you layer on top of that what we're doing with other platforms and how we're growing the gaming space – some of the work we've done in integrating companies like Playfish and PopCap into what we do - and taking this company into the 21st century and beyond, intellectual property that we've acquired or grown, restructuring investments, and everything from free-to-play on Facebook all the way up to 32-player on Battlefield... they're all magnificent moments.
IG: Do you have any regrets about anything in your career?
PM: Well, I don't regret, but from a moment of sadness, [it was tough] when we had to say goodbye to the Dreamcast and admit to the world that Sega, after a couple decades of being a powerful hardware player who helped define and craft the direction of the industry, was unfortunately getting out of the hardware business. Having to transition to being a third party wasn't easy, and companies that had been our foes soon became our friends. That was very difficult, particularly the human cost of that, because we had to let a lot of people go that day in SoMa in San Francisco. That was a tough day because we had built so much together, and our lives were wedded to getting this thing off the ground and being successful, and for a while we were. But then it was a holiday period, getting ready for Black Friday, and we knew the numbers we needed to hit, and we had a 30-day period of what installed base we needed to hit – what the hardware sell through rate had to be – and we just couldn't quite get there. It was a very, very difficult day on January 31 in 2001 when we had to pretty much fold the tent in hardware and transition the company to being a third-party software publisher.
IG: We've heard that you made the call on discontinuing Dreamcast, not Sega in Japan. Do you ever doubt that decision or wish in your heart that Dreamcast had gone on to greater success?
PM: You know, it's funny, the idea of “making the call” came out of an interview with Keith Stuart of The Guardian did – when I said making the call, I was actually referring to the telephone call. He interpreted that as making the decision, and I was very much a part of the decision, but it certainly wasn't just me telling the Japanese team that we need to get out of the console business. We had all agreed – maybe a half a dozen people in the corporation around the world – of what we needed to hit for the platform to continue to be viable going into 2001 and we simply didn't hit those numbers. It's a difficult early period when you're selling hardware because you're not making a lot of money, and in some instances you're losing money. We needed to build an installed base and we just couldn't get there. It became ultimately somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy dictated by the numbers, and so my comment about making the call was that I had to announce – with several hundred journalists on the call, and I shall never forget it – that we were moving on and will not be selling hardware anymore and will be disposing of existing inventory as we transition to third-party publishing.
IG: What's easier – working for a platform holder like Sega or Xbox, or working for a major third party like EA?
PM: I'm not sure if either is easy, James, but they're different, and as I alluded to earlier with EA, what I love about being here is we're purely focused on content. We're very platform agnostic – I'm kind of fond of saying that if it's got a button and a screen and you can put inputs into it, it's a games machine. We've seen that from the Kindle all the way to the browser, and EA is always eager to look at opportunities to bring our content to people who want to play games on machines; I can't think of a company right now that has more experiences across platforms (hardware and software platforms) than EA. I think the excitement and freedom that provides you to be able to talk to the gamer in a way that the gamer simply says, “I'm playing games on this device, and I want EA games,” and it's our job to deliver them.
When you're in the hardware business, it's a little different because you have to be able to develop content that drives your own hardware sales so that you have things that hopefully are exclusive to you that consumers can only get on your platform and therefore they buy your piece of hardware. That becomes a little more complex. But I do enjoy the freedom here, if you will, of being able to provide gamers, no matter what they're playing on, great content, and that's the energy we have here at EA – particularly right now with all the investments we've made, which I think differentiates us from just about any other company in the industry right now.
IG: The dust has settled to a degree on the Battlefield 3 vs. MW3 shooter showdown, although there's still the rest of the holiday leading up to Christmas. Even though BF3 did very well, selling 5 million in the first week, MW3 once again broke records, so it doesn't look like EA stole share. What's your take?
PM: I'm not sure that we didn't steal any share. To your point, it's early days and we're only a month in – we feel very good about it. Two entities have benefited from Call of Duty and Battlefield being on the market: gamers and the industry (retailers and people who rely on the ability to sell big blockbuster games). Together we've grown the genre enormously. 10 million sold in and 5 million sold through doesn't come out of nowhere – if we haven't gained share, that means in the first week we've added 5 million new FPS gamers. I think when the dust fully settles, maybe when we're looking at this at the end of our fiscal year (March 31, 2012) we'll do an analysis and I think we will have taken share. I don't think there's any doubt about that, unless everything BF3 sells is just incremental. But I'm more focused on how we've done by our gamer and consumers, and yes many of them bought both games undoubtedly. Have our retail partners enjoyed this? Absolutely. And does this help push the game industry to the front pages of newspapers? You bet it does. Go look at USA Today, go look at The New York Times – the big entertainment blockbusters this year are not movies, they're video games. Call of Duty and Battlefield have done that.
IG: EA's been pushing digital very heavily while other publishers seem slower to adapt. Do you think the industry is due for another consolidation with a publisher or two dying out or getting acquired?
PM: I guess yes, but I think we always see that with every transition. Publishers either make it through or they don't – transitions are hard because revenue slows down and costs speed up. You're getting ready to develop for new platforms, whether they be hardware platforms or software, and it's getting to be even more complex now. The companies that have prepared themselves and have diversified their offerings to chase the consumer wherever they want to play games are the companies that will succeed and thrive and flourish. Companies that continue to rely on the old model as the model changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future those companies eventually will die off. No two ways about it.
The packaged goods business, while still flourishing and strong, eventually – as we've seen in music and movies – will go to the cloud. It will go digital and we'll be delivering games from the cloud and delivering games directly to hard drives and we're still going to sell a lot of discs for the foreseeable future. But eventually, physical media will diminish as the core part of how gamers get their content. And we're ready for that, but we're also still ready to be the number one packaged goods publisher in the world, which we are. It's about this concept, which I always use in my presentations, called “creative destruction.” As soon as a business model is formed, companies start figuring out how to bring it down and then change the model to advantage themselves. And we're going through a period of creative destruction in the interactive entertainment industry right now that we haven't seen in the 30-35 year history of our industry. If you want to be a publisher that's still going to be viable for the consumer 3-4 years from now, you better be ready to deliver your content anytime, anywhere and to everyone.
IG: Very true – I guess the big question that everyone's trying to answer is exactly when those physical discs stop selling.
PM: And we might be the company that sells the last disc! But by then we'll also be doing several billions of dollars in digital and direct to consumer revenues – however digital is going to be delivered.
IG: Who is your biggest inspiration in the business world and why? Your boss John Riccitiello, by the way, pointed to Steve Jobs when we asked him this same question.
PM: This goes back to my previous career, but I have always admired [Nike co-founder and chairman] Phil Knight. What I liked about Phil Knight even though I had to fight against him [while at Reebok] is that he was so dug into what he believed and what Nike stood for, and if you ever read the history, you'll see that he basically built a business that knocked off Tiger (a Japanese company that's still around) and sold them out of the trunk of his car [Knight had secured distribution rights – Ed.] when he was a University of Oregon track athlete – so he built a business that started out of the trunk of his car and grew to whatever it is today ($16-$18 billion). He's still at the helm; he stepped away for a while, which didn't work out, so he came back and Nike still is Nike. They don't care what anybody thinks – they do what they do and they have built...a massive multi hundred billion dollar business around the world of branded performance apparel and footwear. Phil Knight created that. What I also like about him is he gives back – starts with the University of Oregon and works outwards; he's been a philanthropist and I always admire people who do that.
Bill Gates is right at the top of this heap that makes it young enough to start giving back and seem to have the goal of ending up on their death bed with about $10.52 in their pocket. You don't want to be the richest man in the graveyard, right? Bill recognizes the weight of the responsibility of being incredibly wealthy. He says we're going to take on two things – health and education – and we're going to fix them. I had the honor and privilege of working with him while I was at Microsoft. Not only that, he's smart enough to go corral Warren Buffet and get everybody like it's Vegas to push their chips across the table - “I'll give my $25 billion and I'll see your $25 billion.” So that's what I admire about what Bill's done. But yeah, Phil Knight because I'm a marketing guy and when I think about the brands that have built up brand equity and created an industry that other brands and companies have benefited from, it's Phil Knight, and then secondly for the philanthropic understanding and what he needed to do, it's Bill Gates.
IG: You actually played a zombie briefly in the House of the Dead movie. We're big fans of AMC's The Walking Dead – any interest in trying out to become an extra zombie?
Brains... must find brains...
PM: I loved playing a zombie. I have some awesome pictures of me as a zombie – I'll send you some. It was Uwe Boll's House of the Dead; we were in Vancouver and filmed all night long. It was a great night. We filmed in the pouring rain in the mountains and I think I died 25 times. And I am in the movie itself [so I made the cut].
IG: Can you tell us something that most people in the industry don't know about you?
PM: Well, most people know that I grew up in Liverpool. I was born there and grew up in the '50s, but what most people don't know unless I tell them is that I grew up literally 50 yards away from a family called the McCartneys. And even though Paul is I think 10 years older, he was born and bred on Forthlin Road, and I lived around the corner – I could see his house from mine. It was too long ago for me to remember – my mom could tell the story – but the McCartney family and Moore family grew up not even 50 yards, maybe 30 yards from each other. And Paul was in The Beatles-ish, actually the Quarrymen, when I was growing up.
IG: Thanks for the time Peter.
