Above: Soccer star Sydney Leroux of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, in EA’s FIFA 16.
GamesBeat: Peter Moore brought that up on Facebook, saying he was sad to see “misogynistic vitriol” around FIFA.
Wilson: Here’s what I’d say. Having gone and read a great deal and had our community teams looking at that, that was such a marginal element of the overall feedback—more power to Peter for taking it on and dealing with that individual, but in all honesty, I think that only made it bigger than it was overall. In reality, the feedback to putting women’s teams in FIFA was almost universally positive.
GamesBeat: I wonder about EA’s thought process in making a decision like that. You didn’t know the feedback would turn out that way, right?
Wilson: We have about 350 million in our network that we know. We have another half a billion across our social networks that we know to varying degrees. We’re doing our best to engage in a conversation with them on a moment to moment, day-to-day basis. They told us they wanted women’s teams in FIFA, and so we built women’s teams in FIFA.
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For us it’s not that risky. It’s listening to our community and delivering what they want. When I started making games, we would all get together in a room and say, “What do we want to build? What do you think the player wants?” Then you put it in the marketplace and you tried to see what people played. That’s how we built games. We don’t have to do that anymore. Part of building relationships with our players, part of telling them we want to hear from them, part of engaging in a conversation, is that we can do things that might look profoundly risky, but on the inside they’re simply answering the requests of the players who play our games. We’re going to keep doing that.
Above: The Rift headset with the Touch controllers.
GamesBeat: When you think about platforms and alliances, is there anything think you’ve done that might be critical, that feels like you just made a big decision? Whether it’s supporting VR or getting behind Windows 10, is there anything that feels like you still have to make some important platform decisions?
Wilson: EA’s legacy is we are a platform agnostic company. We have a commitment to our players, a commitment to making great games for the platforms our players play on. The critical decision we have to make is to build an underlying technology layer, ID, commerce, security, infrastructure, data, plus an engine layer that can get games to whatever platform players play. The critical investment for us, the critical decision we’ve had to make, is to invest heavily in this layer that effectively abstracts us out of any kind of platform ambiguity.
When we started we built for a couple. Then we were building for a couple. Now we’re building for 20 or 30. In the future we might be building for 200 or 300. Who can know? What I know is, almost every device I own plays digital music. As I fast-forward three or four years, it’s not unreasonable to believe that every device we own will give us the ability to play games.
In that world, being a platform agnostic company means having a very strong technology layer that facilitates the distribution of content through any platform. Those are the decisions we’re making. Our commitment is to our players. Our commitment is to building great games and getting those games to our players wherever they play.
GamesBeat: That’s true for Origin as well? You don’t have to favor Origin.
Wilson: Wherever our players are, that’s where we want to go. That’s why we’re building for Apple devices. That’s why we’re building for Android devices.
We look at VR. There’s a core motivation that players have to immerse themselves into an experience, to escape into an experience. VR is an opportunity to do that. But as you know, there’s five or six players right now. Our job is not to pick one of them. Our job is to build a technology layer that can facilitate distribution of virtual reality experiences irrespective of how they come – whether it’s goggles, whether it’s augmented reality, whether it’s a room you step into, whether it’s a pod like Total Recall. We’re trying to build at a core engine layer to facilitate that type of experience.
Above: Phil, the star of Minions Paradise, makes a theme park on his island.
GamesBeat: You’re very engaged in mobile games right now. Some of these GMs are reporting directly to you. Is that a sign of how important mobile is going to be, or already is?
Wilson: Mobile is already important. We had more than 700 million downloads of our games last year. We have 160, 170 million monthly active users playing our games every month. There’s going to be another 300 or 600 million devices or something launched this year alone. We went from 200 million players to two billion players in large part because of mobile devices. It’s already super important to us. I’m proud of what we’re doing.
Them reporting to me directly is me saying, “It’s important to us.” I want to make sure that we are investing time and money and resources at the appropriate level, given the magnitude of opportunity there.
Above: Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst has no gunplay.
GamesBeat: What competition do you think about these days? There are things like Supercell being valued at $5.5 billion. There’s League of Legends. There’s Activision. There’s toys-to-life. What shows up on your radar?
Wilson: The competition we have is competition for your best time. As human beings, we have an amount of time we allocate every day to entertainment. That might be watching TV. It might be playing games or listening to music or reading books. These days it’s shopping for a lot of people. Amazon wants your shopping experience to be interactive and fun and give you rewards. It sounds a lot like making games to me.
When we think about competition, we think about you as a player and what you’re engaging with through the day. We know that we need to engage with you a certain amount of time per day in order to maintain that relationship. That might mean we’re competing with another console developer, another mobile developer. It might mean we’re competing with your bank, which is trying to make the banking experience interactive and fun. We might be competing with you and your articles.
It’s not just competition for games. The world has woken up and recognized that interactive entertainment is the best form of entertainment. All of a sudden everyone is trying to do what we do. We get up and we’re looking left, right, front, back and trying to make sure the experiences we deliver to our players are the most entertaining, most rewarding, most inspiring experiences possible.