Greetings from Dana Point in Southern California, where I’m excited to have joined some
of the top minds in sports over the past few days at an event hosted by the
Sports Business Journal called World Congress of Sports. It is testament to the
power of sports video games that I could share the stage with key executives
from the NFL, NBA, FIFA, etc. and not feel that our industry doesn’t belong
here. There were some fascinating presentations, if you are interested in the business
of global sports. I’m perhaps even more excited to have landed in time on
Tuesday to have caught the 1-0 win by Liverpool over Inter Milan at the San
Siro to send them through to the quarter-finals of the Champion’s League.
Another great goal by Fernando Torres secured the win.

As promised, we’re finally up and running today with our new look and blog format.  This is a little more pleasing to the eye, huh? We knew when we did our “beta” launch last month that we were a few weeks away from getting it exactly right, so
thanks for bearing with me, and still getting involved regardless of the somewhat clunky format.

As a neophyte blogger, there are a few things I’ve learned about the blogosphere
over the past few weeks:

- I love the feedback, regardless of how hard you are on me, the dev teams and our
titles.  I’ll echo what I’ve already said
here, and that’s that it’s fun hearing from you and that your feedback is going
directly to those teams.  That’s a big
reason why I wanted to even do this in the first place.  And rest assured that with our migration to
this new format, all of the original posts and comments from the past month
remain in our forums.

- On the feedback, I can’t guarantee everything you suggest will get into the games
or that we even agree with it.  I also
will never be able to answer all of your questions and respond to all your
comments.  But I can promise you that
your feedback is valued and so starting this month I’m going to begin having
producers from our different game teams join me as guests where we’ll review
the top questions and comments from the blog. 
Stay tuned for that…

- It has deepened my respect for the EA SPORTS brand that I have been proud to
inherit. Your passion and input for the titles is indicative of the
relationship so many of you have with the experiences we create for you, and
not unlike the relationship we have with our favorite teams. Some weeks you
love them, other weeks, not so much. My goal is provide you with a more
consistent and predictable quality experience with everything that we develop
for you…

What else is going on?

- This is the time of year when we have a lot of fun announcing our cover athletes.  Earlier this week, we announced that Jeff Gordon will cover NASCAR 09. While it’s hard to argue with that pick, that’s exactly what’s been happening in the final days of our contest to select the cover mascot for NCAA Football on the Wii.  The contest ends later today, and we have a close battle for the cover, with Washington State, Michigan State, Auburn, Nebraska and Central Florida making up the top 5.  I’ve been calling all my friends in the Bay Area all week to get them to vote for Cal…Who wouldn’t want to see Oski on the cover of a video game?

- I’ve seen speculation the past few days about the comments we’ve made recently about new IP coming this year from EA SPORTS.  While we’re still a couple of months away from any official new game announcements, I’m encouraged by the interest and excitement.  As I’ve said many times over the past few months, as EA SPORTS looks to expand our brand and capture new audiences, developing new intellectual property - such as FaceBreaker and future unlicensed titles - will be a key component of that strategy. As an extension to those comments, and coming fresh out of our sku plan reviews of last week, I can tell you we now have EIGHT titles in development for the Wii, testament both to the global impact of that console currently in the global marketplace, as well as to our desire to attract more consumers to experience EA SPORTS games, no matter their experience playing games nor their prowess with a traditional controller.

- You all know I’m a huge baseball fan, and despite my current angst about Josh Beckett’s back spasms and Curt Schilling’s shoulder, I can’t wait for the regular season to get under way in a couple of weeks. So you can imagine that I was interested to see the new ads for MLB 2K8 last weekend on ESPN, as I was watching SportsCenter.  Amusing spots to say the least.  Any of you old-school EA SPORTS fans recognize anything there? Anybody remember Gimme?????

Hopefully you will all enjoy this new format, and look for us to take full advantage of
the multi-media opportunities it affords us over the coming weeks, with audio and video clips, interviews, and more links to breaking news from EA SPORTS.

Cheers,

Peter