EA訪談第一頁光速翻譯 - 任天堂

標題：Frank Gibeau談到的未來、Wii、Rock Band等等

E3展後，GameDaily Biz 和EA品牌遊戲總裁FG談到關於 EA的改組、
John Riccitiello的"讓人無聊到死"、Wii的成功、PS3降價、Rock Band的機會等等

一開始談到EA的組識重整讓FG更能專心在遊戲的品質和發行時間。
(和遊戲無關，有興趣可以自己看)

Biz:談到Riccitiello，他最近有說"我們讓人無聊到死，我們製作的遊戲越來越難玩"。
他表示人們不玩遊戲開始喜歡其他的科技和娛樂，像iphone、Facebook(交友網站)等等
EA做為一個第三方領導者對整個遊戲工業很大影響，你怎麼看？

FG:和Riccitiello談到關於推廣遊戲市場的問題，
我們做了些有趣的研究關於人們如何玩遊戲，
結果發現不只是遊戲、廣播、電視或電影，
人們的零碎時間和社交時間增加趨勢。
所以開始有像 腦鍛、吉他英雄、Wii。

以前又快又強大的處理器主機不是現在市場或顧客想要的。
他們現在更喜歡像Wii般人機介面的改變、像PC般可以交朋友、用手持裝置玩遊戲。
我想講的是我們不只想PS3或Xbox360版的Need for speed(NFS)，
我們更試著找出"在手機上NFS的遊戲體驗? NFS和PC連結的體驗?"
"NFS在上海麻將(Shanghai)上的體驗?"
(mid-session game不知道是什麼？)

Biz:你是個hardcore玩家，你可以指出那個EA遊戲是"無聊死人"的嗎？

FG:不能，因我喜歡熱愛遊戲。我想回到之前的評論，
就是我們想對那些新機會的所做的改變
(第一頁結束)


GameDaily BIZ: EA has gone through some big changes recently with the
reorganization into the four labels. How long was that in the works and why
was it needed?


Frank Gibeau: John Riccitiello came back as CEO back in April, and let me
just talk a little about the context on that. He left EA at a point in time
where he was president of publishing and he had seen how the business was
working in that last cycle and then he went out into the private equity world
and he got to look at us from afar and he got to look at the industry from a
completely different perspective and it gave him a lot of key learnings about
how things are moving, shifting and changing. And in early April he came back
and he engaged the management team with a couple things. He said, "Look,
here's what I've learned since I've been gone and now that I've come back."
What we used to be really good at was nailing a world where we had three
major platforms and a couple major markets and you'd hit it, and bang you
were number one and you rolled through the whole transition, and the
customers were more same than they were different

Now you're dealing with incredible complexity and incredible fragmentation in
the market. You have eleven platforms and you start to roll things in like
PCs in Asia and phones and two different handhelds, maybe three if you
include the GBA, multiple console platforms and then you have an incredible
proliferation of categories. You've got things like 3D social networking like
Second Life, as well light PSWs like Club Penguin at the same time that you
have WoW and at the same time you have these mass console things happening.
So as I said, you have 11 platforms, you have more customers, they're more
fragmented and [John] comes back and says, "You know what? This is a really
cool place to be in. There's a lot of opportunities out there but it's going
to require EA to think differently and to start to configure itself
differently in order to go after these opportunities." It was one of those
things where, at its core, by bringing together the marketing function and
the studio function together under one person, that's enhancing the ownership
of how you bring products to market. Regardless of the platform or customer
type, there's somebody who's now holistically looking at the whole thing. In
our old structure, we had a studio organization and publishing organization
that then met at the top and it operated off of a lot of teamwork in between.
Problem is, as the market got fragmented, those two pieces moving together
across eleven platforms and multiple regions... it became too unwieldy. It
wasn't that the talent and the quality of the thinking was wrong, it was just
prioritizations and the amount of complexity inside that was required to get
something done was just a little bit too much.

So, when you look at it, refreshing and sharpening the focus, ownership and
accountability by moving to a label structure really starts to equip the
organization to go after these new things. At the same time, though, you
continue to keep what you do great, which is that competitive advantage that
we had in publishing, which is the global reach of our organization. You keep
that as a horizontal foundation block; HR, finance, sales, publishing, those
kinds of things. All of those labels operate off of those kinds of things
that make the company great. In terms of core competitive advantage it gives
you scale, but at the same time, we're getting more focused. In my old job, I
looked at everything from the Jamdat acquisition with corporate development
teams and studio to sports to casual to Sims to our various EA franchises.
Now I'm much more narrowly scoped. My job is to go in and look after products
that are in the EA Games label, like Need for Speed, Spore, Medal of Honor,
Battlefield, the EAP businesses with Hellgate and Rock Band. So my focus is a
lot more narrow and I also get to work with the development teams directly
and the publishing teams and look at that holistically from the standpoint of
date, quality and profitability. So it becomes much more interesting in terms
of the levers that you can pull to bring stuff to market. Not to say that we
didn't look at those things in the old structure, but by having a single
person leading that who then looks at the team holistically, that enhances
that nimbleness, that speed, that leverage. It enables more creative
thinking. It, frankly, enables more experimentation, too, in terms of how you
think about the opportunity globally.

That was the thing; before, we were regionally based publishing teams. Now,
I'm thinking about properties, multiple properties frankly, and I'm thinking
about the console expressions in the western market and at the same time I'm
trying to figure out what the midsession expressions are in the Asian markets
and trying to figure out which partners make sense for us to be able to bring
that to market. And so, by being the holistic manager of that thing totally,
it dramatically changes how you approach the business.


BIZ: Speaking of Riccitiello, he recently did an interview with WSJ where he
said "we're boring people to death and making games harder and harder to
play." That's a pretty bold statement and if the industry is largely in
agreement with this assessment it could represent the beginnings of some
pretty sweeping changes. In fact, he expressed some concern that people could
lose interest in gaming altogether in favor of other technologies and
entertainment, whether it's the iPhone, Facebook or whatever else comes
along. As the leading third party EA has a very big impact on this industry,
so how do you interpret this?


FG: I was on vacation at the time, which was probably a fortunate thing.
[laughs] So I came back a few days after the fallout of all that. But here's
how I view what he said, because in our meetings that I have with him and how
he's been talking about the organization, the thing he's talking about is,
"How do you broaden the market? How do you make games more accessible?" We
did some interesting research when we looked at how people were playing
games, and you looked at the rise of casual networking or even social
networking starting to take minutes and time away from gaming, not only
radio, television and movies. And when you started to look at that and you
started to see games like Brain Age, Guitar Hero, the [titles on] Wii; those
are huge shifts in terms of how the market's always been perceived.


There was a point in time in the past where it was all about big, faster,
more powerful processors and that hasn't proven to be the thing that the
market, gamers or customers want. They're more interested in the man/machine
interface changing on the Wii or being able to socially network on their PC
or taking their game with them on their handheld. And so what I think he's...
I don't want to interpret his remarks; they are what they are, he said them.
But what I've been taking away from his leadership is thinking about the
business like that, which is thinking not just about the PS3 and Xbox 360
versions of Need for Speed but trying to figure out, "What is a Need for
Speed experience like in Shanghai in a mid-session game? What is a Need for
Speed experience like on a cell phone? What is a Need for Speed experience
like in a connected PC?" and starting to be more bold about experimenting
with those things.


BIZ: So, from what I understand, you're actually a pretty hardcore gamer in
addition to being an exec, so which EA games have been "boring people to
death" in your opinion?


FG: [pause] Yeah, I'm not going to touch that one. [laughs] With all due
respect, I'll put in my one chip there. I will acknowledge that the one
reason I'm at EA and in this industry is my passion for games. I love 'em, I
play 'em. It could be on the 360, an MMO on my phone, it doesn't matter.
Interactive to me is it. I wouldn't want to necessarily nominate the poster
child for the most boring game at EA so I'm going to hesitate to do that.
Again, I go back to my earlier comments, which is how do we think different
about these new opportunities that are brought to you by new categories and
behaviors.


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