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EA at Morgan Stanley Technology Conference

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello is currently speaking in San Francisco at Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media & Telecom conference. Once again, we're listening in to see if he'll answer or talk about Star Wars: The Old Republic. Riccitiello already reaffirmed double digit growth for the upcoming financial year, and reassured investors worried about the NFL lockup affecting Madden sales.

The full quote to the SWTOR question is transcribed after the jump, but Riccitiello once again stated they are going toe to toe with Blizzard's World of Warcraft and "great money" can be made at the 2 million subscriber level.
Morgan Stanley: The big game coming out this year is Star Wars; obviously not this fiscal year but in calendar 2011. Can you talk a little about your experience developing it... like many MMOs, it seems to take a little while. What potentially makes this one better than some of the others out there?

Riccitiello: We officially created the MMO business with Ultima Online and then Blizzard vastly improved it with a better product in World of Warcraft that realized heights that no one anticipated in this sector. Hat's off to them.

Great product, they've done a great job with it. A lot of companies have attempted to take share. To give some sense of this, there's about 12 million subscribers and rising every year in the western markets for MMO's like this. World of Warcraft has about half that. And there is a similar number but measured very differently across Asia. A lot of these are in game rooms and calling them subscribers requires an algorithm and mathematical calculation...

I don't know how they do it exactly, but it is a very substantial revenue opportunity. Looking at the West alone, there has been a number of companies that have attempted to compete with World of Warcraft, and they've done so with smaller games that were less well-polished, not as innovative and were consequently pale shadows in comparison to World of Warcraft. A lot of trials, but not a lot of sustained business.

We're building a product with BioWare in Austin... and if you don't have a history, BioWare is probably the only developer in the world that is an even-tier to Blizzard in terms of RPGs. The history of BioWare shows they can go toe to toe. They've beat them many times when they go toe to toe in the market place. They've shipped multiple 90-rated products for EA in the short time they've been a part of Electronic Arts.

We're starting with one of the two great developers of RPG's. We're starting with a Star Wars fiction and we're investing what it takes to make a truly great product. Now the challenge of course is, how will that do in the marketplace? We think there's some possibility for challenging WoW for market leadership but that's really not in our calculations.

We've described this to investors in the past, we can make some money at half-a-million subscribers. We can make good money at a million subscribers; we can make a great deal of money at a million and a half, two-million or more subscribers. I can't tell you that I know precisely how all this is going to come out. What I would say though, in terms of market dynamics is, if you imagine a 12 million subscriber market in the West, in which WoW has half of it, that is growing in a low, mid, high-single digits, depending on what gets included, but call it mid-single digits.

We can probably get a million without really affecting them very much at all. And, getting beyond that, we have to start trading blows. I think we've got the product to trade blows. I was playing it this weekend, it works great. Now the issue is finaling it, getting it out in the marketplace, and letting the consumer decide.

Comments

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  • Hardradi's avatar
    Gamorrean Thug
    • Posts: 48
    #20 Hardradi Posted 3/3/2011 12:52:31 AM
    Is it just me or do others think he sounds more confident (even cocky) at this Financial Conference than he did at the (I presume equivalent) Goldman Sachs Conference a few weeks ago?
  • Mentok's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #16 Mentok Posted 3/2/2011 7:01:44 AM
    All that focusing on the west and ignoring the market of the east seems like a bad idea. If I were a Star Wars fan in Japan I'd be pissed. And they love that shit.
  • Jaramukhti's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 782
    #19 Jaramukhti Posted 3/2/2011 7:45:59 PM
    This gets tricky though from a marketing standpoint.

    Star Wars is big in Japan, yes, but it is nearly non-existent in China---not quite sure about Hong Kong, but Star Wars doesn't appear to have a huge audience in mainland China---and Korea. South Korea already has a number of successful MMOs there, not to mention Blizzard has a following due to their RTS games. So you have to ask yourself, "Would Japan, on its own, bring in enough business to warrant a dedicated marketing push toward Asia?"

    If I had to guess, I would say no. Not because Japan doesn't have passion for Star Wars, but because Japan doesn't have passion for MMOs. Consoles are bigger over there than MMOs.

    At this point, I think the only way we might eventually see more focus on marketing to Asia is if somehow Japan makes their presence known on Oceanic servers, or if enough people over there clamor for it. As of right now, Asia is not a huge priority for SWTOR because the one country over there that has a love of Star Wars is also the most wary of MMOs.
  • agentwred's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 298
    #21 agentwred Posted 3/3/2011 3:23:16 AM
    Exactly, its not good business to worry about them right now. Though I'm sure once they are off and things are going strong they will look at making it bigger in the East. But with something this big it is smart to focus on a much safer and smaller portion of the whole pie.
  • The_Passage's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #14 The_Passage Posted 3/2/2011 5:37:30 AM
    "I was playing it this weekend, it works great."

    Well, gee, thanks for letting us know, John... XD
  • Darth Shango's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #17 Darth Shango Posted 3/2/2011 2:09:09 PM
    In two weeks I'll be able to say the same thing! :P
  • Jaramukhti's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 782
    #12 Jaramukhti Posted 3/2/2011 3:02:32 AM
    Riccitiello is king.

    I've been consistently impressed by EA's direction under John Riccitiello. Since he took over, EA as a company has done so much to take some of that old taint away. I'm honestly very impressed. Plus, the guy is a gamer.

    Used to be, all I looked at EA for was EA Sports games and The Sims. These days, they seem to genuinely work to produce some quality titles that are unrelated to sports games.

    Knowing that John Riccitiello-EA is backing SWTOR gives me so much more confidence than if Larry Probst-EA was behind them (no offense to Larry Probst).
  • Harper's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #13 Harper Posted 3/2/2011 5:07:13 AM
    Yeah, reading this has given me a lot more confidence in EA.
  • CornbreadChrist's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #9 CornbreadChrist Posted 3/1/2011 10:51:06 PM
    I hope the collaboration with Gamebreaker goes well. It will be nice to get some guys with more in depth analysis that are following TOR closely on the show mixed with their mostly casual perspective of the game.
  • Socrates's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 414
    #4 Socrates Posted 3/1/2011 10:16:44 PM
    Yeah I hear a lot of people saying late in May like all the star wars movies, but I would really think that they would be advertising the hell out of it already if that was the case. But, advertising be damned, I would love to have it in May!
  • agentwred's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 298
    #22 agentwred Posted 3/3/2011 3:28:49 AM
    That's a good point. If we don't hear anything about it by the end of the month, I wouldn't bet on it being released in May. However, it would be just enough time to advertise it starting the week of PAX if they were shooting for end of may. Hears hoping for good news.
  • Gamewiz's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #1 Gamewiz Posted 3/1/2011 9:58:49 PM
    Right after talking about their Playfish games and competing with Zynga... they made some comment about a game coming out in May. This obviously could be really jumping the gun, but what game are they referring to? I barely heard the comment and need to see the transcription to see if it was still related to Playfish.
  • Aries's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 27
    #15 Aries Posted 3/2/2011 6:20:57 AM
    Releasing the game on the so-called "Star Wars Day" (4th May) or "official Star Wars Day" (25th May, relase of first SW movie) would be awesome...
  • emlaeh's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 986
    #5 emlaeh Posted 3/1/2011 10:18:50 PM
    They are not going to announce the release month of the game in an investor conference call. It is going to come from BioWare and go straight to the consumers.

    IMO, don't read too much into that.
  • Gamewiz's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #6 Gamewiz Posted 3/1/2011 10:26:01 PM
    *shrug* John has slipped before... Granted, Bioware has said that the release date will be announced at a major convention, but I highly suspect something like a conference call for when a release window is narrowed down.

    But again though, I need to see that transcript to get the context of when he said that and what he was referring to.
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