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FIFA and Madden Earning Great Acclaim

I'm back from an excellent trip to GamesCom.  Having shifted this year to Cologne, the organizers of this year's event and participating publishers and hardware manufacturers should be applauded for presenting such a compelling showcase for our medium.  The combination of great games, big announcements and flawless logistics, complemented by a perfect August window, made for an event that certainly rivals E3 now as the most important milestone on the game industry calendar ... just ask any of the nearly 250,000 people who were in attendance (yes, this was a consumer event after trade-only on day one).

Aside from our demos and news around FIFA and EA SPORTS Active More Workouts at EA's Tuesday press briefing, the biggest headline of the show had to be from Sony.  As I told a number of people last week, Sony's price drop is coming at the perfect time, it's great for gamers and I'm optimistic that it can mean very good things for us at EA SPORTS, where we know titles like Madden and NCAA Football have always had a very strong base of fans on Sony hardware.

Bottom line - this was a great inaugural effort from Cologne, and I left the show energized and optimistic, both for the industry, and for introducing EA SPORTS to more PS3 players.  

As exciting as it was to see how popular FIFA was in Europe, I also watched with delight as reports came in about Madden's success out of the gate in North America.  Madden has its highest critical acclaim in five years, and online engagement continues to show extraordinary growth year over year within EA SPORTS games.  In the first weekend alone, Madden became our first title to ever hit 100,000 peak simultaneous users - nearly 10,000 more people than can fit in the NFL's largest stadium. And...more than 5.6 million online games were played during the opening week; the equivalent of over 21,000 NFL regular seasons!

While we are still cautious about worldwide economic conditions, this type of continued growth in our online experiences makes us feel very strong about where we're placing our bets right now in development and as a business and it makes us optimistic with the trends we're seeing with Madden.

Congrats to our passionate and hard-working team at Tiburon who should be applauded for listening to Madden Nation and delivering the product fans have been begging for.

Before I go, two final items on GamesCom:

  *If you missed the video we released last week, please check it out here then go to the poll on Football World and let us know what you're most excited about with the new game.

  *We were happy to welcome World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Wladimir Klitschko to our booth during the show.  I was delighted to see how big a fan he is of our industry and of Fight Night Round 4.