Back from Season Opener

petermoore — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:02:00 GMT

Back home after a big week up in Vancouver. We hosted our first-ever EA SPORTS Season Opener, a showcase of most of our upcoming games for this year for media from all over the world. It was a great chance to give early looks at our new games to media who had come from near and far to get a taste of what they can see this year from EA SPORTS.

You may have read some of the news and game previews that have come out of the event over the past few days. A few things I wanted to highlight:

•   I’ve mentioned a number of times that a real priority for us as the gaming industry evolves is diversifying our portfolio. We unveiled two new initiatives last week that I think we will do that.
o   We announced a new sub-brand with games designed for a broad casual sports gaming audience. EA SPORTS Freestyle replaces EA SPORTS Big, and we plan to ship three new games in the next year under this brand. FaceBreaker, coming in September, will be the first. While no announcements have been made, I’m also very interested in the health and fitness space and think we can be a leader in this space. Afterall, I was a P.E. teacher years and years ago and am excited about what we could do here.
o   We also announced an initiative for the Wii called “All-Play”. We’re designing five of our most popular franchises exclusively for the Wii this year and they’ll feature unique controls, unique modes, unique presentation, and unique packaging. All-Play is a much more all-encompassing design philosophy that expands significantly on last year’s Family Play control scheme in Madden, FIFA and NBA LIVE.

•   Last Wednesday, we confirmed that Fight Night Round 4 is in development and slated to release in 2009. It was an honor to have three of boxing’s best at EAC to make the announcement. You’ll see below that Winky Wright, Lennox Lewis and Sugar Ray Leonard look more at home in the ring that I do, but it was sure fun listening to them talk about the sport and picking their brains for ideas for Fight Night. We obviously also listen to feedback from the fans on what you want to see in our games, and so we’re also excited to be bringing Mike Tyson back to videogame boxing for the first time in nearly a decade. That’s something fans have been begging for.

•   I also had a chance to catch up with a number of our producers over the past week and remain really motivated by the great work that’s being done. After we had our first announcement about this year’s Tiger Woods game last week, we had some questions about some of the new features. So I caught up with Executive Producer Mike Taramykin and asked him to clarify a few things they have planned for this year. Click here to see what Mike had to say.

Cheers,

Peter

Peter Moore Blog : Mike Tyson

Back from Season Opener