IndustryGamers sat down with EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello during E3. Riccitiello shared with us his reactions about E3, and when we asked him if he'd heard about Microsoft's and Sony's respective pushes into motion sensing controls, he responded “about 15 months ago.” He then added, “I've been playing with them for a while now. We've got our own secret little laboratory on my floor of the [EA] building and we screw around with this stuff.”
Riccitiello seemed genuinely excited about the possibilities these new technologies could bring to gaming, what EA has up its sleeve to leverage the new motion sensing tech, and what this all means from a console cycle point of view.
“A year ago some industry analysts were suggesting that the [console] cycle was going to be five years like all prior cycles. I actually think the most relevant start date is when the market leader launches... so if you sort of bridge [the cycles] from PS2 to the Wii, we're in year four. We've been saying for a while that this cycle's going to be longer. We've already got high-definition gaming and what we're seeing is something that Nintendo tapped into first: the traditional controller can be an awfully intimidating device for a large number of consumers. So they tapped into a new audience and new kinds of gameplay and it resonated and got a lot of success. Interestingly enough, we've seen three partner plays – Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo – with a different approach. Natal looks like a breakthrough idea – like any breakthrough idea, you never know how large an audience it's going to realize. But it's certainly very compelling for a number of game concepts I've got in my mind and my teams are working on. And I find it very compelling. I think the challenges around it is that there's a lot to be worked out – it's not something consumers have interacted with before,” he commented.
Riccitiello continued, “Probably something a little closer to the consumer experience as of today is the [motion] controller that Sony put out – that seems oddly somewhere between what Nintendo has out and what Microsoft announced. It's probably less jaw-dropping just to look at it. On the other hand, it's an engineering prototype so it'll probably be jaw-dropping by the time they bring it to market. But probably more importantly is that it looks like a great bridge technology, meaning you'll be able do a lot of things that you could never do before with game platforms. And it doesn't require quite the leap of faith that Natal does. So I think they've carved out very different market positions; my honest view is they are both [MS & Sony] going to expand the market in different ways and they're both going to be successful.”
“What the Wii did was brought out the Wii MotionPlus, which is shipping first with an EA game – which we're very pleased with – and I think that's a big positive. So what we've been trying to tell people is that this is a better way to go for this generation of consoles because just making a better GPU or CPU doesn't seem to be as important at this point in time, especially when you take a look at what we're putting out already in terms of pixels. It's pretty staggering; it's not like we're lacking for fidelity with our graphics or sound. So what I took out of this is that 4-5 years into a cycle we have hardware news on all three platforms and if you noticed both Nintendo and Sony made pretty big noise in the last six months on their handhelds. So I think if I pick a single thesis out of all this, it's likely to be a very extended cycle and it's probably going to dampen the boom and bust cycle we had in the industry beforehand. It used to be that the next set of consoles would come out when people tire of the last ones and that's challenging for publishers, but I think that's [now] mostly gone.”
IndustryGamers will be bringing you much more from our John Riccitiello interview soon.
