Frank Gibeau is a veteran gaming executive who until recently was in charge of console and PC game development at Electronic Arts, a gaming colossus that has had some misfires and queasy moments in recent years.
What follows has been condensed and edited from a conversation with Mr. Gibeau at EA’s headquarters in Silicon Valley as the company prepared to introduce Battlefield 4, its biggest game of the year.
A few weeks after this chat, Mr. Gibeau became head of EA’s mobile development. He is a forceful spokesman for gaming in general and a rejuvenated EA in particular.
How healthy is the overall gaming business?
Interactive gaming was probably a $25 billion business in 2005. Much of that was in consoles, a little in PCs. Now it’s a $60 billion to $70 billion business. Much of the growth was generated by mobile. Every smartphone, every tablet, is a gaming-enabled device.
Gaming used to be something that teenage boys did. Now everyone does it.
If you have 10 minutes, you’re not going to read five pages of a book or watch five minutes of “The Avengers.” You’re going to drop into gaming. It’s bite-sized time.
Mark Pincus at Zynga was one of the first to advance the notion that in the future all the people would be gaming all the time.
But Zynga blew it. They’re not a mobile business. We’re six or seven times their size in mobile. Zynga fell into a hole because they were completely focused on one platform, which is Facebook.
What turned Electronic Arts off Facebook as a platform?
We saw all the Facebook users going to smartphones. You can’t play a game on Facebook on a phone. Coupled with that was the fact that customer acquisition costs were on a straight line up.
What about consoles? That’s where EA built its reputation. Is console gaming going to go the way of the video arcade?
People have been writing about the demise of the living room scenario — you’re leaning back on the couch with a big-screen television in front of you, using dedicated high-performance hardware from Sony or Microsoft — for years.
That demise was widely predicted here in Silicon Valley.
Yes. I kept hearing that console gaming is a dinosaur, headed to the tar pits. Then the new consoles were announced, and people started saying, “Can you get me one?”
How are you making the transition to multi-platform?
Look at Disney. They do a spectacular job of acquiring world-class intellectual property and then — “exploiting” is probably the wrong word — bringing it to market across multiple channels in an appropriate way for each. So you can see the property in a theatrical big-screen version or as a TV show or a webisode or an interactive game. We’re doing the same thing here with our interactive properties.
Can a game like Battlefield really be enjoyable on a smaller screen?
You can play Battlefield on a tablet in commander mode. We are working on a mobile game of Battlefield that will be high-end and high-performance. It’s our bet that we can successfully pull that off. But we’re embarking on something no one has ever done before — to get these games to inter-operate between platforms. Will it work? It already has in some cases. Will it work for all franchises? Not all franchises will make the transition. Battlefield might be a little harder.
But generally, fans want all content everywhere?
Does someone pick up a mobile phone and say, “I’m just not interested in a war fantasy”? They are interested. So how do we create a war fantasy where it’s a multiplayer destructible environment and it feels great? It’s totally possible.
All of this is going to require a great deal of investment and thought to get the basic game right.
You can’t take shortcuts with games like you used to. You can’t put out a console game without a lot of thought. It’s very much a higher risk market. But if you get it right, you have a billion-dollar franchise.
And then you have to keep doing new versions to keep players’ attention?
A positive problem is figuring out how to sequel Battlefield 3. A negative problem is how to sequel Medal of Honor [a shooter that bombed]. I’d rather have you and your buddies still playing Battlefield 20 months later. That allows the development team to innovate in a live setting.
The highly authentic military shooter, a la Medal of Honor, seems dead or at least inactive.
Genres come and go. At one point in time, flight simulators were the No. 1 selling game. Now you can’t give them away. Remember when Air Guitar was big? Now it’s in a landfill in Arizona.
When I looked around to see what fans were saying about the next Battlefield, I never heard so much carping and criticism in my life.
It’s like with sailors on a ship. You know you have a problem if they’re not griping.