EA Play's Rod Humble
On The Sims 3, 3DS, motion controllers and the social games mindset
As head of the EA Play label, Rod Humble is responsible for the massive PC franchise The Sims, as well as a portfolio of family and casual titles at Electronic Arts.
GamesIndustry.biz recently sat down with Humble to discuss the new version of The Sims 3 for home consoles, and other technology that's around the corner – why the 3DS could exceed the success of other Nintendo handhelds, the appeal of new motion controllers and the inspirational attitude of social games developers.
We've done versions of The Sims for console before and they've sold really well but they were usually tailored to a console because we couldn't fit in all of that PC world. But with this generation of platforms we can finally do it. It took us a while to get all of that in but it's now got all of the PC features and the world simulator and it also has the exchange, which is where players can upload and download their creations and share them with each other. And we're bringing over a bunch of the PC exchange as well so console users can get to experience it.
We're pretty excited and from a game design perspective I'm interested in seeing how people play it differently on a console versus the PC. Because some of the things you'll do the in privacy of your own study on a PC screen is different to what people do on the living room with others looking over their shoulder. I think it will be more of a soap opera of looking at this little world. It's entertaining to watch and I think people will play it differently – I'm intrigued to see how it will work.
We certainly hope to emulate that on console. As fast as we can get new stuff done we'll be able to deliver it to our customers rather than having them wait a couple of years for us to put out another version on a disc. We certainly hope that'll work. As always with The Sims there's a lot of player created content so we feel that those who want The Sims created content they will have it there for them to play with, and for those that just enjoy themselves with other player's content, that's fine.
Obviously you have to make sure it's appropriate, but it's not that far off from things like uploading a high-score, or someone's avatar onto a regular game. It doesn’t really break the model too much, the servers are ours so we're carrying the backend. Our partners have been pretty good about that.
It depends on the customer and what the customer wants. Out focus is to cram in everything we possibly can for the base game and then see what the audience wants. They may want more hairstyles for customisation or they may want more towns. That's the approach we've always had with The Sims and our customers always let us know what they want.
We loved it. It's stunning. We began development on it some time ago and we had the same reaction that I guess you guys did – "it works!" So quickly we got to work on that and The Sims really feels perfect for this and how the characters can pop out. We're thrilled by it and the good news for the EA Play label is that the DS market has always been extremely kind to us with The Sims and MySims and the Hasbro portfolio, so we're thrilled that Nintendo is going to easily match its previous success if not exceed it. It's great to be there early with a game that because we've had a lot of time working on it, is going to be very high quality out of the gate.