Developers Need to Communicate with Customers, Says EA Sports Boss

Information these days is almost as valuable as gold, and this is also true in the video game industry where people are desperate to find out new and exciting things about their favorite franchises and about titles that will appear in the future. Just check out the amount of controversy and speculation the recent 15-second TV spot for Modern Warfare 2 or the teaser site from Kojima Productions have generated.

That is why developers and companies need to always be connected to the general audience in order to further highlight their own creations in the eyes of the consumers, says EA Sports president Peter Moore, in a recent interview with GamesIndustry. He thinks that the big number of ways in which to communicate means that customers can be kept up to date with the development of a game, either through blogs, developer diaries or even Twitter.

We've changed radically the way in which we communicate with our consumers, not in the last five years, but in the last 18 months. We've traditionally taken a more measured approach to consumer communication during the development process. As I sit here today I can tell you that every franchise development team has a blog, producers are encouraged to get on there and communicate,” Moore says.

He further develops his argument: “They expect to be spoken to, they expect to receive Tweets from whoever they're interested in, they expect people like me to have a blog, and they also expect to be able to talk to our development teams – regardless of how busy they are during the day. If that's what they expect, they are the customer, and we have to find ways of delivering on that.”

In this day and age, it seems that the means of communication with normal gamers are increasing by leaps and bounds. We've been hearing a lot of new details via Twitter or in various pod or videocasts from the developers themselves. Hopefully this will become something standard and the end users will have a higher degree of access to the process of creating a video game.