The Art of Play - Part One

It's really terrific - what was merged was the Casual Entertainment division with The Sims group, and what that really meant was that it brought together four business groups - The Sims, MySims, Casual (which had Harry Potter and Boom Blox) and Hasbro - all unified into one division.

What that meant was that the expertise that was being developed, such as in the Boom Blox team - those guys know the fabulous ways you can really leverage the Wii. The game's award-winning, but that insight and knowledge needs to be shared with the MySims team as they work on games. Similarly, there are no better PC experts in the world than The Sims team - so you're seeing that cross-pollenisation.

From my perspective the marketing teams have also had that opportunity on the business side. Again, what we're leveraging on The Sims 3 in terms of social networking being a primary marketing vehicle - actually that's not as appropriate for, say, young kids, but as we go into building up Littlest Pet Shop online, or any kind of kids online sites, we now know a lot more about social networking and how you dial it down for younger consumers.

So what was really great was taking all these smart minds and bringing them together.

Well, it is about portfolio management, and you do have to balance out launching certain titles. For example, MySims Agent - which is our Fall game - is a bit of a mystery game, solving clues and cases. We were looking at launching the Hasbro game Clue/Cluedo, and what didn't make sense was to launch those titles right on top of each other - we shouldn't compete with ourselves.

What you have now is a group that can look across the portfolio of franchises, genres and play patterns and start to architect when products are launched. We're not afraid to see more than one launch targeted at the same consumer, otherwise there'd only be one game for girls, but we're getting really smart about optimising opportunities over a full year - and then globally as well.

Absolutely - it allows us to leverage our internal resources, and then our communication out. So the consumer and retailer see them in a way that makes sense, rather than everybody trying to put titles out there without a lot of rhyme or reason, but simply it's just a great game.

The Play label doesn't own casual gaming exclusively. Given that that's where a lot of growth in the market is - if you ask most people what EA Sports means you'd hear about excellence in sport, and realism. But EA Sports Active is obviously very different from that - it's a casual title - and it's the same with Spore Hero.

So I think what you're seeing is across EA, we haven't become rigid in who should go after a casual opportunity. We've kind of asked who has the greatest expertise - sports and fitness, there's the knowledge in EA Sports.

We tend to say that what we're about it surprising and delighting consumers. We're probably more consumer-centric in our focus than any other label - EA Play is less about "Let's make a great game, because we know there's a market out there." It's more about seeing that girls are really getting into gaming, younger and younger. We have this partnership with Hasbro, and Littlest Pet Shop is the world's most popular girls' brand - let's go to market with a Littlest Pet Shop title.

So I'd say it was a consumer-centric approach that asks where the market opportunities are, and then goes about building the right titles and game experiences towards them.