Too Big To Fail

Brands were less important two years ago. Not that a brand wouldn't have helped two years ago, but I don't think you needed it. Now, there are ten times as many people making games, Facebook is a less viral environment, and the quality has gone up. So brands are starting to do what they do in other markets; they have started signalling to players, 'you want to play this game, and not that game.'

So I think brands are critical, but not any old brand. It should be something that matches the audience, so if what you choose to make is a hardcore game and you're okay with hardcore game numbers on Facebook, then a hardcore brand will work. For a massively resonant brand like The Sims Social, Facebook is perfect, and there are many other brands that EA has got - particularly in the Maxis label - that will be similarly resonant, whether it be SimCity or anything else of that nature.

Brands are now extremely important, and I think that you either are a big player in the space already and you have an installed base of users, or... I think you're in big trouble

So I think brands are now extremely important, and I think that you either are a big player in the space already and you have an installed base of users, or you have a... man, otherwise I think you're in big trouble. It has just become a much more mature platform, and I'm not saying somebody can't rise up from the bottom - sure they can - but the barriers to entry now have changed in a big way and it's become a lot harder.

I see that trend continuing, but at the end of the day, though, a brand is never a replacement for a good game. If you have a great product and a great brand, you'll have a lot of success.

With regards to the deconstruction and reconstruction of the brand, this was one of the easier tasks. The Sims was born to be a social game, and if you look at the games that have been successful on Facebook to date, most of them come straight out of the Maxis play-book.

And there's a reason: Maxis has been in the business of making games that appeal to a mass audience, and that have to do with a persistent thing, whether it be a farm, a world, a city, a household.

So for us, we're looking at this game that involves fundamentally improving your Sim, your Sim's house, and your Sim's relationships - all three of those things easily beget micro-transactions, whether the most vanilla of micro-transactions like, 'I wanna buy that couch,' or more complicated ones like the need to complete a quest when you don't have time to do it. It was pretty easy for us to imagine from day one how we were going to monetise this game.

The hardest part about social gaming, and online gaming in general, is that it's a service. When we ship the product our job is only just beginning, so we are constantly facing churn, as is every other player in the industry. You can never provide enough content and new features for your most engaged players; they are always going to consume it more rapidly than you can provide it.

And that begets a series of very difficult choices in terms of what you're going to choose to do. Generally, we focus on providing those elder players - the ones who stick around the game for longer - with a great experience, keeping them satisfied. But with a large team you can also allocate a portion of your resources to just making it a better experience.

In a lot of cases people churn because they have a lot of options and they don't have a lot of time

So for example... we've got a good chunk of our development resources going towards making the game easier to play, reducing the friction. In a lot of cases people churn because Facebook gamers... I'm not gonna call them lazy, but they have a lot of options and they don't have a lot of time. So if you have a game that takes a minute to load or plays too slowly, they're just not going to have time for you.

So, yeah, we've had churn as well, and the way we're going to chase that is a really great road-map. You're going to see new content in the game several times a week, new features more than once a month, and you're going to see massive new features every couple of months.

We intend to invest a lot in the game and make it a multi-year franchise, and we intend to bring other games to market using the brand as well, so that we can become a force on Facebook not just this month but for the years to come. That's our goal.