The Art of Play - Part Two

Well, the Wii is such an interesting microcosm of what's happened - you had the hardcore who were the first people to go out and buy it, but then it's come out and continued. We've seen it blossom to include grandparents, and even the youngest consumers, and families.

I believe our engagement on that is not to always be necessarily on the leading edge of it, but to be right in synch with where consumers want to play. So for example, there have been a bunch of party games on the Wii which have been okay, but we were the one to really bring a top party game out with Boom Blox - first the original and now the sequel.

So our approach is looking at it from a quality and innovation standpoint as opposed to throwing a lot of SKUs out there and seeing what sticks. We're pretty methodical about what we choose to launch - a lot of pre-development testing and market analysis is going into it, so what you see is a tight focus.

This could be a house full of 50 games if we wanted it to be, but the approach that we're taking is certainly for high quality development, and then best-in-class licenses or our strongest IP.

He's equally involved in the sequel as he was in the first one. I think some people think he was a name - he was actively in the studio every two weeks, he's a huge gamer. Boom Blox was his way of having a game for his family to play with him. The sequel, and what's happened from the first game, I think what we realised is that we had positioned it from a marketing standpoint mainly for kids from 8 to 12 years old, but what we heard from the research was that everyone was playing it.

So you'll see that we've added more elements to the game, and certainly how we're marketing it, that really broaden its appeal, so that it goes beyond what we lovingly call the 'blow things up' approach. There's a bit more strategy play to it now, so I think the game's gotten better and better.

Actually the game has allowed us to graduate beyond that. For the initial launch we could say that a lot of the interest came from Steven Spielberg now being in videogames. That was a good thing, and it was also around the same time he was doing Indiana Jones so there was a lot of buzz.

But what I think has happened was that the game was a great game - I forget how many top awards that it's won, but at least ten. What's happened now is that people see Boom Blox for just being great, so while he was a big part of the second game, that's not our main thrust - the main thrust is features and all the new elements that we've brought in. So one message has advanced beyond the other.

It's all about going to where the consumer is - we can't expect them to have to seek us out. Still the top way with kids is TV. They're watching television and that's their primary source of knowledge.

But what we're seeing with Harry Potter is that kids were going online - it's an expensive thing to ask mom for a videogame, so they really use online to research and make sure they really want to buy the game. So we've moved online up as a part of our online approach significantly.

Then, as you get older, with The Sims 3 (16-24 year old primary target) - those folks aren't watching TV. Good luck there, they're all Tivo-ing or watching online, so we had to go online. It's probably one of the first marketing plans in EA where the online is more heavily weighted than television - and that's an evolution. We have to spend a lot more time getting to this consumer group, that's a lot harder to find than ever before.

No - it's everything, from creating trial experiences that can include social networking activities to traditional online advertising and search engine optimisation. Now there are many, many tools.