EA Play's Rod Humble

I've never got a technology guess ahead of time, so I'm going to let the market decide. I've learnt my lesson [laughs]. I'm the guy that thought the Game Gear was going to be great. I'll say that the good news for us is that when it comes to doing 3D with glasses it's a relatively easy development solution for us. If and when customers embrace it we've got the games there for it. In terms of guessing how that market is going to go, there's a lot of people smarter than me in the electronics industry.

We're very different from movies in that film usually starts off with a 2D palette and so extruding that to 3D is really hard. Most games nowadays, even if they look 2D, are built on 3D engines. So for us we've already got the z-axis built in. So we know how that's going to work and it's relatively low cost. The effort is actually on the design side – what can you do from a design perspective to be more meaningful in 3D.

I'm always excited when I see new hardware because from a game design perspective it's exciting to think, "what can we do with that?" I would say that both the new motion hardware, Kinect and Move, they work well. When you play with it, it clicks. From a game design perspective it helps me think about there are now buckets of game design. One bucket is the user interacting with a stylus or a mouse. Then the other bucket is the traditional controller. Now there's the third bucket, which is multiple platforms with motion controllers. That helps clarify my design thinking and when we come to look at products we can see that now instead of that being one console there's three areas that we can target. We look at it in terms of game design.

We're going to have several titles out for those systems. We'll reveal them at GamecCom. If you look at our portfolio you can easily guess how motion control fits in with that. We'll talk some more about those in Germany.

Absolutely. I think that the great thing about their teams is they're incredibly responsive to their communities. They are listening to the community every day and they know what works and what doesn't within hours. I really admire that, and I really admire the fact that the game development philosophy is very old-school in terms of get it out there, see how the customer responds and then change it. They're able to get something to market very rapidly and put something out there. That can be very liberating. You have a wacky idea and you can try it. Those are two things I've really enjoyed seeing again working with the Playfish guys.

I think that there's actually a lot of similarities with massively multiplayer online game designers. These are designers who are used to living with a 24/7 service. It's a really different mindset. Knowing that every second you've got a problem with your game you're losing a customer is different than assuming it's something you can fix in next year's version. They've really got that mindset of every second there's something wrong with our game there's a problem for us. So we have to fix it now, go out and patch up immediately. It's that service mindset that's really powerful.

I hope so. I think with The Sims that turnaround has got faster and faster over the years. We make sure we get updates out there quickly. As we launch more and more services we've got better. With some platforms it's not a choice, with social gaming it's not a choice, you can't wait to fix a problem.