EA's Jens Uwe Intat
The European VP talks about the region's market, mature games on the Wii, and the iPhone's importance
We're trying - one of the explanations we have is that there's a lot of double ownership, so people having a Wii and a 360 and/or PS3. They're really playing different types of games on those two machines, and historically up to know we assume those people will have played the more mature content on the more high-tech machine.
Dead Space Extraction is going to be a very nice test of that hypothesis, because we're really building a game where the Wii version is very different to the Dead Space game on 360 and PS3, and we'll actually see whether we can reach more people with a) a great game and b) interesting content.
If that's not going to work, then obviously the whole proposal from our point of view at least of more mature games on the Wii just does not work.
Yes, I agree.
Well, we certainly see in our investment into the mobile division, with the acquisition of Jamdat, as a clear testament to our belief in the future of mobile gaming. We certainly see a lot of growth in that space, and we've certainly seen that mobile phones have a much, much higher development speed compared to anything else, including PC.
And they're becoming much more powerful in order to play games - one of the key challenges we're having is that they have some sort of base standard, there's still a lot of variety in terms of processing power, storage space, screen sizes even, which make it a bit more challenging.
The iPhone is actually a nice example, because there you've got a huge amount of one type of device on which you can programme, which is similar for the Nintendo DS, and for the videogames consoles - one of the biggest benefits is that you have one standard into which you build.
It's a very easy-to-use device too, so it will certainly be another future pillar of interactive entertainment.
I would say that the penetration of the iPhone is still very much at the beginning. It's driven by some high prices in some markets, by some exclusive distribution agreements... in absolute terms it's a really nice number of gadgets out there, but in terms of the fraction of the total mobile phone market it's still marginal.
And Italy - the Italians really love their mobile phones.
Candidly-speaking I'd say that Russia is still a growth market, it's still high up on our priority list to build it, but it has certainly been hit very hard by the financial crisis. We had expectations a year ago that everything would grow faster than it has done, and Russia has been particularly badly affected, but it's not going to put us off from any of the investment we're making there. It'll just take a little longer than we originally anticipated.
We think Brutal Legend is a really cool and fun game, and Tim Schafer is a real icon of the industry. We're certainly very happy and proud that he's working with us. We were very happy that we will get the game out in time and allow people to have a lot of fun at Christmas.
We're the entertainment industry, right? If we can't make subtle jokes, I don't know in which industry you can make subtle jokes...
Dr Jens Uwe Intat is VP for Europe at EA. Interview by Phil Elliott.