Virtual Reality

What we've got is a really engaged consumer base. What we know about our sports consumer is that the relationship they have with their club, and the relationship they share with other fans of that club, are some of the strongest relationships in their lives. So an experience that allows them to re-enact that reality through interactive entertainment drives a level of engagement that most other genres can't deliver.

There's an identification that people have with sports games that can't be easily replicated. Most of us can believe the fantasy that we could play for Chelsea; we've kicked the ball around, we believe that we understand what that feeling is and that we can replicate that in a game.

Most of us haven't been in Afghanistan with an M16. We want to relate to that, but for me, personally, the relationship to sports is much, much stronger. First-person shooters are great games, they're great escapes, but the longevity behind the relationship with your team and other fans is exponentially stronger.

Really today was about how the learning that we have in the games industry around putting the consumer in the centre of every strategy can apply to other industries, whether it's managing a football club, or a brand, or a soft drink, or whatever it might be.

We're seeing more and more interest. I think they've always had an affinity with a game like FIFA - they always thought that was kind of cool - but what they didn't realise is the level of engagement that could drive.

I talked today about a stat: Tottenham vs. Arsenal on the weekend had about 35,000 people turn up to the game... Straight after that we pushed a challenge out to the Tottenham and Arsenal fandom and we had ten times that many people try to relive that game virtually, and in the broader day we had 8 million games of FIFA played online - just on that day.

So when you talk to people about that, you say, listen, you can get 35,000 people in your stadium, and engaged. Well, you can get people watching television, but that's kind of a passive experience. Or, we can drive ten times the stadium capacity, specifically around that game, and we can have 8 or 10 million games of FIFA a day. The level of engagement and interactivity we can drive with your team, and what we can tell you about the people who are playing as your team in the game - that was very interesting to them.

At the very centre of all of that is data. We get a lot of it from broadcast, a lot of it from people playing our games, and that's valuable to both types of companies. We already have a tremendous relationship with ESPN, and we do a lot of things with Sky right now. I think those relationships only get stronger,a dn that happens because, again, the consumer will want that.

These days you sit and watch a sports game, you have your iPhone and your iPad there on the couch. You're getting stats from other games in the league and from other sports, and so this concept of connected platforms is as important to a broadcaster as it is to us.