Too Big To Fail

First of all, I agree with you - you need product to make it happen. The second thing is that I think it's more accretive than it is a transition.

I have a hard time imagining the kind of player - and I'm one of them, by the way - that really likes the hardcore first-person shooter experience, like Battlefield 3, I really can't imagine that player-base going away. I can imagine them downloading the game rather than going to a retail store to buy the game. I can imagine purchasing behaviour skewing more and more toward purchasing in the game as opposed to up-front. But the notion that they're going to stop playing games that require intense hardware - whether it's an Xbox 360 or a gaming PC - is crazy. I think that the numbers speak extremely loudly.

A minority of our players are core Sims players, but they are and will continue to be a critical part of our ecosystem because they were the first adopters

This business is getting bigger, not smaller. I just think that what's happening is, in parallel to that, Facebook and social graphs are expanding the audience of gamers, and that's going to create opportunities to teach people who never thought about playing hardcore games, didn't have the money to have that intense hardware, or the technical understanding to figure it all out, we're going to create opportunities for those guys to like core games as well.

Well, on October 20 the latest Sims 3 expansion pack, Pets - which is historically one of the most popular - launched, and we're doing things to push people towards that. It's early days in the relationship between us and Maxis, but if you buy The Sims 3: Pets you get stuff in [The Sims Social]... and you can imagine in a year, two years from now that our understanding of our players will be much more expansive.

Whereas today we understand our players and Maxis understands theirs, in a year's time that CRM (customer relationship management) database is going to be the same thing. And at that point I very much can imagine pushing people around all of the franchises. It's not just gonna be a funnel from us to them; it'll also be a funnel from them back to us.

We certainly see a lot of promise in owning the player and the franchise versus focusing on the hardware. It seems to us that if you can get a player into the concept of playing a Sims game, you can get them playing Sims games on all of the different devices they own.

When you've got 40 million people playing your game every month, by definition the majority of our players do not play The Sims on console. In the early days, one of the reasons our game grew so quickly was that it was well designed to be viral, but at the same time people recognised the brand. They had played it, or their brother had played it, or they had seen a poster in a store two years ago, that kind of thing.

We definitely benefited in the early days with a quick surge of early Sims players and a bunch of other people recognising the brand... But people who joined from, say, week two to month one tended to be people who had not played [The Sims] before. At this point a minority of our players are core Sims players, but they are and will continue to be a critical part of our ecosystem because they were the first adopters.

Yeah. It has been a total proof of concept that a good brand with mass appeal combined with a well designed social game works. We saw orders of magnitude higher click-through rates on every type of communication that we sent out, whether it was e-mail or a fan feed or a request. It said that The Sims imbued players with a sense of trust or knowledge that this is a high quality game.

But the truth is that the brand can only get them in the game; it can't keep them there. We have seen brands enter Facebook gaming and fail before, and I think the reason is that they had the brand but they didn't have the sticky game.