Peter Moore - Core gamers uncomfortable with industry growth lyrics

I think we're going into almost a golden age of gaming, where it doesn't matter where you are, at any time, any place, any price point, any amount of time, there's a game available to you. And our job as a company is to provide those game experiences. And then on our big franchises, tie them all together. I think the challenge sometimes is that the growth of gaming... there's a core that doesn't quite feel comfortable with that: your readers, the industry in particular. I don't get frustrated, but I scratch my head at times and say, 'Look. These are different times.'. And different times usually evoke different business models. Different consumers come in. They've got different expectations. And we can either ignore them or embrace them, and at EA, we've chosen to embrace them. There is a core - controversial statement coming from me, sadly - that just doesn't like that, because it's different. It's disruptive. It's not the way it used to be. I used to put my disc in the tray or my cartridge in the top, and I'd sit there and play. And all of these young people coming in, or God forbid, these old people coming into gaming! It's a completely different approach in the way we're listening to gamers and the way they want to consume games. Half the people loved the fact that we were showing well into the future, and then the other 50 percent were basically calling BS because it was conceptual prototypes (which is how we build games, by the way). So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Our view was we wanted to get early feedback on where we were. And when we say early, we mean years in advance. Publishers typically, and we were no different in the old days, just don't like to do that. You just don't like to expose yourself and open the kimono to gamers to get that amount of feedback. You have to embrace social media as a plus rather than a negative: everybody has a megaphone now. Everybody has an opinion, and you learn to filter the rant from the constructive feedback. We were hearing a lot from the Need for Speed community saying, 'Wouldn't it be cool if? Couldn't we do that?' And you just know that you can't get that done: when we say 12 months, it's really 10 months of actual work. So you just make the decision that is better for gamers. They have adopted a franchise that was inextricably intertwined with Criterion for years, and they need the time to make it their own, and they deserve the time to do that. My job is to make sure we figure out something else that would go fill that revenue gap. We just have to embrace it. We as an industry have to embrace change. We can't be music. We cannot be music. Because music said, 'Screw you. You're going to buy a CD for $16.99, and we're going to put 14 songs on there, two of which you care about, but you're going to buy our CD.' Then Shawn Fanning writes a line of code or two, Napster happens, and the consumers take control. Creating music to sell is no longer a profitable concern. The business model has changed to concerts, corporate concerts, merchandise, things of that nature... Actually selling music is not a way of making money any more, except for a core group. I think the core audience that dislikes the fact that there are play-for-free games and microtransactions built into those... fine, I get that. As you know, I read all the stuff, and it is the most intelligent commentary on the web as regards games. There's no doubt about that. But every now and again, and you've seen me do it, somebody will come in there and say something stupid that I think is beneath the site itself and beneath the industry. I don't think anybody has to like it, I think that's where it goes. It's like me; I get grumpy about some things, but if the river of progress is flowing and I'm trying to paddle my canoe in the opposite direction, then eventually I'm just going to lose out. From the perspective of what needs to happen in this industry, we need to embrace the fact that billions of people are playing games now.