The Art of Play - Part One
Russell Arons talks about the combination of Sims and Casual in the EA label structure
Late last year Electronic Arts announced a reshuffle in their still-new label structure, which scrapped the Casual and Sims labels and combined them into one entity, later called EA Play.
At a recent showcase event in Paris, GamesIndustry.biz caught up with Russell Arons, VP of marketing for the EA Play label, to find out how the new entity was faring ahead of some big releases in June.
We're about to have our most important month, because we've got three major launches - The Sims 3, Harry Potter and MySims Racing. What's interesting is that each one of those is aimed at a slightly different consumer audience. The Sims 3 is looking at 16-24 year-old PC players, Harry Potter is certainly focused on the Wii platform, and then MySims Racing is an extension of the franchise.
Each one of those games has been developed from the ground up specifically against those consumer audiences, so we think it's going to be a very big quarter for us. Even within EA they're three of the highest priority launches - so the EA Play label is a really important part of what's happening in EA in general.
What you're seeing is an interesting counter-seasonality that casual is bringing - a lot of June releases - if you think that casual is more typically in the holiday timeframe and becoming a bigger part of EA's total portfolio.
Half strategy, half shifting. Harry Potter was supposed to launch last November. But in some cases, and EA Sports Active is a great example, the consumer research said that for a product that's aimed largely at women who want to get in shape, that when do they want to get in shape? In time for swimsuit season. So naturally a May launch makes the most sense to lead up into the summer.
In terms of The Sims 3, the timing was in part driven to allow us to truly develop the marketing. Because we really want to be the number one PC launch of the year, it's not just about appealing to the current Sims fans - they're critically important, but we know we have to bring new consumers in too.
Also people who have lapsed - they tend to be males between 15-17 who used to play, but aren't so sure now. A lot of what we've put significant effort into since we moved from February into June was creating trial experiences for new and lapsed players, to say that it's a whole new Sims.
Everything from leveraging social networking heavily - our Sims Sidekick is something that launches, depending on what country you're in, from Facebook or Bebo, that gives people a way to take Sims characters, send them around the internet and see how they react.
And for the first time ever we basically have a Sims 'lite' online game, called Sims Social. The consumer insight pointed to... let's say you're a hardcore Sims player, and I'm your girlfriend. You love the game, and try to get me to play, but I think it takes too long to play, and just want to try it out.
We never offered that before - but Sims Social is basically a way for you to play multi-player online in a trial experience. It's a demonstration that the way we're approaching The Sims is new in the marketing, as much as it is in the game itself.
It wasn't enough to simply create the best Sims game ever - we had to come up with a marketing plan that brought a whole new franchise of people into it.
What we hope is that we have a lot of people buying the game as it comes out, and that sustains through the whole year. My personal hypothesis is that you're going to have the current Sims players and community be the first players online in June, but as our marketing efforts on all these trial experiences go on over time I think Holiday will see a lot of lapsed and new players joining in - because it's a great gift.