State of Play: Electronic Arts

"I don't even know if Steam Vs. Origin is a proper battle, I would rephrase that a little," Intat opines.

"I would say that we're introducing Origin as our consumer relationship platform. We want to build a platform that allows consumers to have the best experience you could ever had with EA games. It's going to be one of the offerings that consumers can use. There's a space for Steam, there's a space for Origin, there's a space for third party etailers. Both pure etailers and traditional retailers that are entering the digital distribution space.

"I think in that space that competition will create superior experiences for the consumer and there's space for more than one player.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not a competitor to Steam, I'm just saying that there's more people out there than just Steam and Origin. While with Battlefield and Call of Duty, it's really just about those two, that's the difference."

Moore sees the service going further, becoming a social network in its own right, retro-engineering the success of Facebook gaming bear hug to turn the communities of games into a wider reaching circle.

"It will absolutely become a social network," says Moore. "I'm already using it every day to see what friends are doing, to understand what coming from EA, plus you'll see announcements over the next few weeks of third-parties coming on board and having their content becoming available. We love the fact that we can deal directly with our consumers."

EA products will also continue to appear on other download services, and in fact Steam itself, with the recent withdrawals purely the result of some of Valve's policies on patching and updating, we were told by Moore, who reiterated Intat's portrayal of Origin's market position.

"I'm not sure we're taking them on," the ex-EA Sports head explains, "we're a great compliment to that business.

"We want to be able to support our customer directly. If there are opportunities to do that, then we'll do that. If Valve, through Steam are willing to allow us to do that, then there are no issues whatsoever. In the instances where you're not seeing a game on Steam, it's primarily because we can't deal directly with our consumer to resolve issues and do things we want to be able to do."

For two companies which have collaborated so closely in the past, direct competition could be seen as something of a souring of the relationship, but the EA executives consulted played down any perceived schism between the two corporations.

"Valve is run by very clever people, and I would say that's also true for Electronic Arts, we're all good business people," Intat says.

Valve is run by very clever people, and I would say that's also true for Electronic Arts, we're all good business people.

Jens Uwe Intat, Head of EA Europe

"So, Valve, when they're looking for distribution for their products, looking at which publisher could actually do that, then I think we're the best publisher on the planet, both in Europe and North America.

"We have a long history of distributing Valve products and I think for every title they will look for who will do the best job. There's no strain on that relationship because we're competing in one space. We're basically competing and working with a lot of people. Every first party manufacturer is a partner of ours when we're distributing their product, and a competitor of ours with their own software. I think, as an industry, we're pretty good at competing and co-operating at the same time."

Whilst that might not harmonise particularly well with EA's current stance on market leading FPS games, internal co-operation and harmony seems to be a cornerstone of the new EA, and much of that in embodied in the growing concept of company wide technology drives.

Cross pollination of internally developed technology is already in evidence with the transition of the ANT animation system to Battlefield 3 from the EA Sports titles and the propagation of Autolog, but it's the Frostbite 2 Engine, applauded by Moore and Intat alike as "the best" in class, which has perhaps the greatest potential impact for the publisher.

"We've kind of seen this before with what we've done with FIFA," says Moore. "It was only four years ago that Pro-Evo and FIFA were fighting it out. That's not to say we don't still have a battle with Pro-Evo, but the numbers speak for themselves on market share.

"We made an investment in a brand new engine to match a new generation, Konami did not. You can look at what we've done with Frostbite now as the engine for Battlefield...We are going to take market share. Activision happen to be in the way. It's not like we're targeting anybody. We want to be more dominant, like we used to be with Medal of Honor, focused on what we need to do with the FPS category."