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OmegaNemesis28 · 09-01-08

EA President on MMOs, the Wii, and Sporn

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Last month at the E3 Media & Business Summit, EA president John Riccitiello casually shattered the wall of secrecy surrounding BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic massively multiplayer online role-paying game. Unfortunately, his lieutenant, EA Games president Frank Gibeau, is more disciplined when it comes to speaking the press. In the second section of a two-part interview, the affable executive deflected any questions about the KOTOR MMORPG with a polite "no comment" and a brief laugh.

But just because Gibeau was tight-lipped about the BioWare Austin-Lucasarts collaboration didn't mean he didn't want to talk about MMORPGs. That's because the executive will be overseeing two massively multiplayer launches in the next two years: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning on September 18, and The Game Which Will Not Be Spoken Of in 2009. Both games are aiming to lure away some of the near-12 million subscribers of World of Warcraft--a game Gibeau himself has played extensively.

Indeed, online gaming as a whole is central to EA's strategy. In two weeks, the company will launch Spore, Sims creator Will Wright's highly ambitious evolution-civilization-space-exploration simulation. The game takes user-created content to a whole new level, letting players create their own race of creatures and upload them to EA's servers, where they can wander into other players' games. Unsurprisingly, the Spore Creature Creator's dizzying array of options has led to the spawning of thousands of X-rated monsters since its release in June.

How will EA keep kids from inadvertently encountering rampaging penisauruses and genitaliarachnids? What will it take to take a bite out of WOW's massive user base? What's going on with the Medal of Honor series? Is Black coming back? GameSpot sat down with Gibeau to get some answers... again.

GameSpot: So the launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is fast approaching. What groundwork are you laying to take on World of Warcraft?

Frank Gibeau: Well let me back up and say that core to the strategy of the company--and very specifically our label--is that we want to be online with everything we do. I'm no longer greenlighting games that are single-player only, even console products. They have to have deep online modes because that's where our fans are spending a lot of time and, frankly, that's where a lot of the value in the IPs we create can really take hold.

We already have two operating MMOs. We launched a game called Ultima Online in 1997, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and that's still in business. It's still got hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Then there's Dark Age of Camelot, which we picked up when we bought Mythic we also have a situation where we have well over 100,000 subscribers. Both are highly profitable, but they're old world.

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