The Alphaville Herald

GameSpot Interviews Darth Vader

by Alphaville Herald on 13/05/04 at 7:23 pm

by The Phantom

In a recent intervew, GameSpot talks to EA’s CEO (they call him “King”, but why quibble) Larry Probst. My favorite part is an exchange in which Ole Lar seems to admit that they went to EEE and found that Sega had a better football game. The solution? Outmarket them! What a hero.

Here is the passage about Sega football. Of course he *says* they “caught up in terms of quality”, but, um, reading between the lines…

“LP: A prime example is a few years ago when we came to the show and saw Sega?s football game. Our development guys looked at it and said, ?Oh, my god, their game looks better than ours, plays better than ours, and they?re going to launch in three months!? I mean, they went away from the show, doubled down, put more resources into the team, and caught up in terms of quality.

At the same time we said, ?You know, even if we get people on quality, we have to out market these guys.? And so, coming right out of the show we said, ?Okay, new game plan. We?ve got to double down on the resources, we?ve got to out market these guys, we?ve got to get really aggressive.? And that plan won the day. We ended up with 80 percent market share and Sega got 20 percent. And at the show, arguably somebody could have said that was going to be reversed, because Sega had a much better looking game. So E3 gives us an opportunity to look at the competition and we?re?and coming out we?re very systematic about what we need to do.”