EA Mobile believes that brands are only half of the answer in mobile games

Above: Clash of Clans is one of the most-successful mobile games around the world.

Image Credit: Supercell

GamesBeat: If we’re in a cycle now for brands in games on mobile, what are some of the characteristics of this cycle?

Mooney: When I look at mobile right now we’re seeing several things. The quality of games has raised substantially. Investment is meaningful. Two years, a team of 40-60 depending on what stage you’re at. Serious investment. Marketing is an interesting question. One of the big benefits of paying for an IP, obviously you’re hoping to not have to spend $20 million a month on marketing and still receive a lot of the organic benefit. EA installs very well in that way.

Coming to that, where I’m going is, before, five years ago, it was mostly enthusiasts and aficionados. They would find something fun, it would pop up, and there was a lot of churn. Now we have so many games that the bar has risen. Expectations have solidified as people have turned into gamers. I used to joke at Zynga that we turned your mom into a hardcore gamer. Clash of Clans has taught a lot of people how to be a good strategy gamer. The bar has raised.

The price of that is that it’s hard to innovate. It’s hard to be 25 percent better than Clash of Clans. Bing Gordon talked about that at Zynga. It applies very much. To beat Clash of Clans you have to be better. People love it. They have years of investment. They’ve spent hundreds of dollars. To be better than that, you have to come in from a different angle. IP is a chance. Playing with The Simpsons, that’s a unique differentiator. As the market matures, brands become important because it’s an entry and a differentiator in a profound way that players will care about.

GamesBeat: What predictions would you make about how this cycle will proceed?

Mooney: It’ll move in the way we’ve generally seen with console. It will become fewer, narrower, bigger in terms of what succeeds. There will still be the occasional thing that pops up the list, coming from nowhere. The reskins of the original versions, or the non-branded IP, that’s interesting. Working with your own IP—this is an experience EA has. SimCity is an interesting one. It is an effectively a branded IP. That’s worked in our favor. The game has to deliver on that, though.

You have to deliver on the promise of the IP. You have to look at it carefully. Is this something worth having from a marketing standpoint? Can I deliver something that, for someone who loves this, they will want to play it? That’s hard. I wouldn’t say we’ll see consolidation, but we’ll see a disappearance of the middle class. Lots of little three-person studios, lots of little companies focusing on some very specific thing like the Apple Watch, and then the biggest games—which we’re starting to see now—are from bigger companies who are able to put muscle behind it, guarantee quality, and deal with big branded IP. You have to have a certain level to even have table stakes to play.

GamesBeat: I’m curious how the hardcore gamer brands are going to do on mobile. We’ve seen Take-Two bring Grand Theft Auto onto mobile via premium sales. They’re not launching these games as live services. But when they make a transition to free-to-play live-service games, do you think the hardcore gamer brands are going to take their share of the market?

Mooney: Some will. It’ll vary. The Grand Theft Auto game has been relatively successful over the last two or three years. It would be a question of whether it’s the halo or the experience itself. I’m not capable of answering that. EA believes that some of those hardcore gamer brands—you’ll see us explore — in a methodical — committed fashion, stuff like sports. Some of our other brands I expect we’ll do. We’re actively working on it. I myself am working on brands that gamers love.

For what it’s worth to this room, part of the reason I came to EA—a meaningful factor in my decision to join—was precisely because I did feel like brand and quality were going to be critical. I wouldn’t say you do every single game in your portfolio that way, but to be a serious player you must be good at branded IP. You must have deep pockets. You must be able to deliver quality.

GamesBeat: What about some other things that require huge investment, like mobile gaming as part of this larger toys-to-life trend?

Mooney: It’s fascinating. I believe Lego announced its game just now. I don’t know a lot about it. I think it’ll be interesting to see. The VR stuff will be interesting to see. This is where, in terms of table stakes, you have to be a relatively big company, because you have to be doing this stuff. We released stuff on the watch. We released Real Racing. Admittedly very early.

Toys are an interesting one. You have to have the right combination of toy brand. Skylanders, to me, is a one-off. Stuff like the Lego and the Disney Infinity games will be more like what we’ll see.

GamesBeat: Apple says there are 607 games on the Apple Watch now. I don’t know if there’s a big hit yet.

Mooney: It’s an interesting platform. I’m wearing one. I love it as a watch. It’s a fascinating piece of technology. We’re very committed to it, just within my own group. EA as a company has separate efforts. Within my own group, for my new stuff, I have people working on the watch. It’s important in how it extends the experience, particularly in terms of deepening social. You have that capability.

That said, since the focus here is on branded IP—again, that will require a higher degree of difficulty. We’ll have to think carefully. Not only will we have to deal with the watch, but we have to fit it properly. I thought Family Guy did a rather naïve implementation of it. We didn’t. We want to make sure it fits with the IP.

Above: A bunch of Apple Watch apps.

Image Credit: Apple

GamesBeat: EA itself has gone through a fair amount of reorganization in mobile. The main transition seemed to be the one where you went from premium games to free-to-play live services.

Mooney: That would be my perception. I’m newish, but that’s certainly where I think the focus has been—hiring people like myself who have deep roots and experience in free-to-play.

Question: You mentioned that you thought the industry was going to break into a couple of big players and lots of really small studios. What’s your take on how the revenue will break between those groups?

Mooney: Hard to say. It’s going to be very hard to be in the top 30 for a sustained period unless you’re a fairly big player. It’s one thing to have a hit. You will see a couple of companies that take a hit and leverage out. But already, when you look at that list, it tends to be—of all the games that have ever been in the top 25 grossing, I would imagine that it’s a surprisingly small number of companies that have had any sustained success. The list is relatively static. It’s hard to break in.

GamesBeat: Andrew identified a risk of the branded game business, which is that the IP owner may take away your license after a period of time and give it to somebody else. You have that with the Minions game coming up. The last company that had the Minions license was Gameloft. Now the next game coming out is EA’s Minions Paradise. It comes out in concert with the movie. A licensing relationship doesn’t last forever.

Mooney: That’s true. I feel confident—not to bring it only back to the games, but with somebody like Gracie, we are deeply integrated. It would be very difficult—That is a really tight integration. There’s commitment and deep knowledge and effectiveness. The way you tend to mitigate against that is you take it very seriously. In many ways it’s a marriage more than a marketing opportunity, if you’re going to do it right. To buy a license you’re spending a lot of money. You’re providing a lot of guarantees. You’re committing a lot up front. That is a deep integration. That will tend to keep the relationships longer term.

Question: I’m curious, being a recent devotee of the Mad Max franchise, and having recently read that Kabam was going to do a mobile game based on that—unlike a product marketing to film release, how is the window so wide and broad between a film’s release and a mobile game being released in support of that?

Mooney: This is directly relevant. The short answer is that the quality of the game is more important. We’ve seen, with other IP, that it’s much more important for the game to be good than to be day and date with the movie. If you have a big movie it’s in people’s minds. If you need to take a couple months more to make sure the game is right, do it. I expect, without any knowledge of it at all, that they wanted to tune their game better.

We’ve seen that a lot. The Gameloft Minions game came out well after the movie and lasted for a fair while. Get the game right.

GamesBeat: On the flip side, Reliance Games admitted that their Hunger Games game that came out was falling short because they were in a rush to meet the day and date launch of the last movie.

Mooney: There’s a philosophy on soft launch, but that would be my guess. My own strong preference—you want to be day and date with the movie. You want to be before to get full benefit. But be right on the game. You can’t make a bad game and expect it to win. In social, at Zynga, we started off making games that were very opportunistic. Within a couple of years it had gotten to quality. Mobile moved much faster. After the first year in mobile you had to make quality.

Premium was okay because people expected a defined experience. You could get it out on time by chopping 20 percent of the levels. You could reduce the feature set. I don’t think, in mobile, you have that same luxury. There are minimum expectations if you’re shooting for the top of the charts. You don’t want to ship without meaningful pieces tuned right, without engagement, without monetization. Even at the cost of losing some acquisition. I’m with Andrew all the way when it comes to LTV. Engagement and LTV, in that order, are the most important things. That’s where you need to deliver.

To tie it back into brands, what brand helps with is engagement. People are engaged in that product. That’s why you make that deal, because engagement is the hardest thing. It may affect your audience size, but if you get more engagement, you win. Lots of games in the top grossing have very small audiences. Many, many good IPs are much bigger than that. If you deliver that core experience, even if you miss the movie, you’re going to win.