IG: There’s constantly talk about how video games are now on par with Hollywood as an industry, and you can point to things like Modern Warfare 2 and the massive launch that it had, setting off all sorts of entertainment records, and of course how The Sims franchise itself has done about $2.5 billion in revenue and that puts it in the class of some of the big blockbuster films. Do you feel that, legitimately, video games are now a real rival to (or on par with) Hollywood?
WW: I think in economic terms, roughly, yes. I’m not sure that that’s a very useful metric really. You can say “Is Hollywood on par with radio?” And back in the '30s that would’ve been economically a loss between the two, but when you look at where movies have come relative to radio since then, it obviously was really a bigger market and had lots more range of artistic expression than radio, so I think that it was, if anything, kind of a lower bar, if you were to make the comparison back then. And I tend to think games really have the potential to keep going and exceed…you know I think movies were really the primary medium of the last century, and interactive is probably gonna be the primary medium of this century, so the fact that we’re crossing movies right now, is interesting but I think it’s just kind of a marker toward what’s potentially going to be a much larger aspiration.
IG: What do you think, in your view, are the big hurdles right now for the industry to get to that next step? What are the major challenges that game makers are facing right now and have to overcome?
WW: Well, I think if you’d asked me five years ago I would’ve said, making a more diverse set of offerings for a larger group of people, but I think we’re very much in that phase right now, so I think we’re kind of on track with that. Also, I think we were a little too platform specific for a long period of time, but that’s changing as well. I think that we’re in this period of maximum disruption, but when we look at this 10 years from now, we’re gonna see that all these new niches opened up and that what we thought of the game industry is now a very small fraction of what we now consider the game industry. I think just right now we’re starting to see these niches open up and it's kind of hard to predict which are gonna be the major pulls in the future, the major directions as people consume these. I think we’re seeing games basically just diversify in every possible direction, very, very rapidly, like in the next few years.
IG: Yeah, I think one thing the industry really has to capitalize on is the whole shift to digital distribution; it's a challenge but it also presents a real opportunity. If you look at how the music industry handled that, they pretty much failed, as they were taken by surprise by all this and CD sales went way, way down as all the music was basically pirated online. So right now there’s a lot of talk about the transition to digital and you also have streaming services like OnLive and Gaikai from David Perry. How crucial will that transition be for the industry? What’s your take on the whole transition?
WW: Well, with the distribution issue… we kind of saw it coming. It was one of those things where we talked about it, talked about it, and now it’s finally happening. That happens frequently with these technologies – people talk about it for 7 years, and then it happens. But I think games are in some ways fundamentally different, in the fact that they’re malleable, that people can create their content, that they can build very strong interactive community experiences around them, and that means that having them over some kind of network, with ongoing digital assets and things being traded, really adds to the value of a game, much more than it does to, let's say, a movie or a book. So I think that’s gonna be the really critical factor, is the fact that games are a world that’s build for a network world, as opposed to something where we all sit in the same theatre and see the same movie. And they were built to be potentially more user centered, more collaborative…you’ve got user generated content, user communities, mods, all that stuff, and I think that is really gonna be the defining factor. This is something games have been doing for quite a while, but it’s really accelerating. But it’s something with games that's basically going to be their rocket assist relative to other media.
IG: The last time I spoke to you, you had mentioned how you were intrigued by the iPhone as a games platform and in the time since, of course, we’ve seen, I guess similar to the social games phenomenon, we’ve seen a real explosion of iPhone development. The App Store has just really grown in terms of the offerings that are available both free and paid, and games are the biggest category on the store right now. So I’m curious what your take is on that and also what impact you feel the iPad will have, if you think that’ll be just as huge as the iPhone?
WW: The iPhone and other platforms like that are very interesting because the scale of development is so much smaller than developing a title for PS3. So with roughly the same development effort you can knockout probably 20 or 30 iPhone apps for one PS3 game, and what that allows is to go for a lot more diversity; it’s kind of a shotgun approach…lots of little games, little apps, maybe things that don’t cost you very much as a player. I might spend 3 bucks for one of these and really enjoy it for 2 or 3 hours as opposed to spending 50 bucks and they basically have to give me 40 hours of enjoyment. I think that right now we’re kinda treating it as a small computer. I’m sitting there playing little versions of my games on a little screen, and we’re just at the point of people starting to look at this thing now as a real mobile platform and that being one of the benefits of the play experience. This is kind of moving toward the augmented reality stuff in a way. I think we’re going to have whole new experiences that are more immersing in the real world rather than in a virtual world, and that’s going to end up being the real niche that these platforms fill.
Now, the iPad is interesting because it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to carry in your pocket everywhere. On the other hand, I think that the web has become such a ubiquitous tool for so many different things, that I can imagine it - personally, I think I would use it in my own home just because I always want to grab something off the web and to have to walk into a different room to get to do that feels like an imposition. ...There’s basically a void between this little tiny screen on my iPhone and my big giant computer in the computer room that I think the iPad is kind of meant to fill for browsing, media, mostly in the home environment. It’s something that, depending on the connectivity and a couple other things, I might use instead of a laptop, especially since it’s kind of instant-on with battery life, etc. I think it’s definitely a niche that could be filled. I’d have to live with one for a while to see how well they fill it. But the fact that it basically is already leveraging a platform, the iPhone, for apps, right out of the box, you can play a lot of little tiny apps, which is a good start as opposed to there being no software for it.
IG: Last time I spoke to you, you had clarified how, even though you’re no longer with EA, you still have a consulting agreement with them to meet with them regularly to assist with any ideas for The Sims or Spore. Do you have any updates on your input into those franchises? Are you still regularly meeting with them and helping them shape the future of those franchises?
WW: Yeah, they’re just down the street, so I see these people all the time. I’m not sure of the things that they’re working on, what’s been announced or not, so I have to be careful what I talk about there.
IG: Well, I guess more generally speaking, what would you like to see happen with those franchises? What ideas or new things are percolating in your mind for The Sims or for Spore that you’d like to have implemented as part of the game design?
WW: Well, those are the kinds of things I talk to them about. [laughs] But I think that what they’ve done with The Sims 3, they’ve really done a good job of managing that franchise in terms of how they expand it, how they’ve catered to what the people have been wanting without ruining the core experience. I think each franchise has its own community, its own territory that they’ve staked out and they’re all exploratory in some sense. You’re always wanting to try things where you think the fans might want to go, but maybe you’re not quite sure and sometimes you might do that with a new version and sometimes you might do that with an expansion pack, or maybe a lighter, online experience that leverages off of that franchise. I think every franchise is very different in terms of where you go with it strategically, but again, I’m not quite sure what they would like me to say about that because I’m not quite sure what they’ve publicly announced or not.
