Frank Gibeau talks with Venture Beat on EA’s digital ecosystems, Star Wars games, and Titanfall (interview part two) with information about EA’s future, games in the works and more. As you may already know, Electronic Arts has some very large properties in the video game world. FIFA Soccer, Titanfall, Star Wars Battlefront and more are examples of some of the big titles we have coming from EA this fall.
Venture Beat talked to Gibeau about this and more in part 2 of this great interview. See a snippet here:
GamesBeat: It seems like you guys, as EA, can believe in a digital ecosystem around games. If you’re Disney, you can believe in transmedia. You can do toys and films and whatever. You guys have the Need for Speed film. When do you step outside that?
Gibeau: We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of intellectual properties at EA. Then, you couple that with the ones that we rent or have partners with — FIFA, Madden, Star Wars. And then that leaves the last room, which is something completely new, something you never heard of before. We have bets there as well. We have three to five bets in the next console cycle that we’re very excited about. They’ll be very ambitious projects. We’ll want to get them out early in this next cycle. You’ll hear more about them in the future.
GamesBeat: It seems like a very complex business still, though. Is it hard to operate without a CEO?
Gibeau: Well, we have a CEO. He had a tour of duty at EA before, which went OK. He doesn’t operate like an interim CEO. He’s running the business. He has an experienced group of people in leadership positions here. We had and have a sound strategy. Larry has come in — we’ve worked with him before — and we really aren’t missing a beat. We had a strong E3. We put together a strong plan. We’re guiding to a strong outcome.
I can’t comment on the process and the other things we’re doing there. I can tell you that he doesn’t feel interim and it doesn’t feel like we don’t have a CEO. We definitely have a CEO.
GamesBeat: Once upon a time, you talked about the gambling market and whether that would be a question EA would figure out. Have you decided what to do about going into online gambling since there is this connection to social casino games and the like?
Gibeau: We continue to look at it. We publish free-to-play casino products. We’ve looked at building games in that space. We’ve looked at the real-money segment of that. There’s a lot of challenges in it. It’s very complex, both from a business standpoint and from a regulatory and legislative standpoint. Again, we’re observing it. We haven’t ruled it out, but we haven’t ruled it in, either.
GamesBeat: When it comes to Star Wars, are you going to tell me what you’ll do with the Battlefront game? Can you give any hints to all the fans?
Gibeau: Take all the goodness DICE is bringing to Battlefield 4 and imagine that’s being applied to Battlefront. But we can’t just slap the license on it. We’re not doing that at all. Battlefront is going to have a lot of unique features. We’re going to add a lot of new stuff and new ideas. We’re well down the path of development on it. As soon as we’re ready, we’ll tell you more.
