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GS: Now you mentioned the Wii...
FG: In general, I think the talent inside the EA Games label is really excited about two things: The Nintendo Wii and the online opportunities connected consoles afford. That's where I see a lot of our bets going right now. I'm trying to dramatically improve and expand our Wii development, and think you're starting to see that with Skate It and some of the other titles.
GS: Well it seems like some of those bets haven't paid off as well as you've hoped. I mean you guys hyped Boom Blox pretty heavily, but it was only kind of a hit, selling under a half-million copies...
FG: I think it's done well. It's just a different curve. When you look at Boom Blox or Cooking Mama, they have a different sales curve that what you'd expect with a day-one event. Different types of games, such as puzzle games and more casual games, have flatter, longer curves, and stuff like licensed movie games and even shooters are much sharper and they spike differently.
For our label, the Wii is important, and we're building quite a few games for it. We've expanded development for it. We believe that as the market expands on the Wii, there's going to be a large segment of that market that are going to be core gamers that want to have traditional experiences with the Wii innovation tied in. And we've made games like that. Medal of Honor [Heroes II] was very successful for us, we've got Need for Speed, and Skate It coming out.
GS: Now you mentioned Medal of Honor. Over the past few years with Call of Duty, Activision, and Infinity Ward have reinvented the World War II shooter genre that Medal of Honor basically created back in 1999. Now, they've taken the series to new heights by bringing into the modern era with Call of Duty 4, which outsold Medal of Honor: Airborne many times over. Do you foresee a similar transformation in store for the Medal of Honor series?
FG: [Pauses] We're definitely looking at Medal of Honor, and we're working on some ideas against that franchise. I've worked on Medal of Honor from the very first game, so I know when it was spectacular and when it wasn't so spectacular. So we have some ideas about how we're going to bring that back and really compete there.
This is a really good example of where we created a category--World War II shooters--and someone else--Call of Duty--wow gold --came in and did a really great job of taking over that market. But the cool thing about technology is that you do have this ebb and flow between categories and key franchises, and you'll hear more about Medal of Honor in the future. I can guarantee you that.
GS: So it will be a modern military shooter?
FG: [Laughs, shaking head] Well, right now, we are very proud of Battlefield: Bad Company. If you look at the multiplayer piece of that game by itself, the online stats are just amazing. There are tens of thousands of people playing today right now, and have been every day since launch. It's our first 85 game on Metacritic, and it's our first single-player experience built by [Swedish developer] DICE. In the shooter category, if you line up the EA guys we've got with [EA Partners] Epic, Valve, id, and Crytek and our properties like Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and if you go back a few years, Black, there's a great stable of shooter franchises in our group.
GS: I remember a few years back during an EA earnings call you guys said there would be a new Black...
FG: I've got nothing to announce there.
