There’s much more that goes into creating a FIFA game that you might think and the combination of technology and sport has been taken to an amazing level. An excerpt of the interview is below, the whole thing can be found here.
Let’s start with your background. Where you came
from and your journey to get where you are at today. – I was brought up
in a little town in the highlands of Scotland. My father ran the local
football team so I played football from an early age. My dad also ran
the Aberdeen supporters club so we traveled to Aberdeen every weekend
to watch them play football. I ended up going to university in Scotland
for computer science and then I got a job making football management
games as a software engineer in England. After a couple of years of
doing that I got a job here making FIFA Manager and then got a job on
FIFA. I then switched from software engineer to creative director a
couple of years ago. I guess that’s it in a nutshell.
It sounds like
you get to marry your two passions with your job. – Yeah I think I’m
really lucky. I think I was about 14 years old when I identified that I
wanted to work in video games. As soon as I started working in England
I identified FIFA as something I wanted to come and do. At the time I
was a Pro Evo fan but I saw great potential in FIFA and I wanted to
come and help these guys try and help grow the game. It’s been a dream
job for me. I must admit that most days I look forward to coming into
work because I’m working on something I love. Getting to work and
playing on a football video game, sitting here making changes to the
game…it’s exciting to try and make it more like football. So I guess
it’s the dream job for me.
It sounds like it. It’s great that somebody
that is such a fan of the sport and of video games is in charge of the
direction of the game. – Over the last five years the studio has really
worked on turning around the fortunes of the game. One big part of that
was to make sure that the team is filled in the key positions with
people who are passionate about football. For me coming from a football
background, playing football video games, watching football and playing
football my whole life it’s good for me. And the guys working with me
here…I’ve got a Jamaican - Canadian who played football for the Jamaica
under -21s, we’ve got a Colombian producer that’s on the game play team
here. All three of us are steeped in football history, but with
slightly different slants. I mean I’m a guy who likes to get the ball
and pass it so the football games I’ve tried to create are influenced
by that, whereas a guy I’ve got here is really skillful at football and
he likes to do the skill moves and maybe showboat a bit. So there’s a
nice blend of football backgrounds and I think that’s important for
FIFA as well. With it being such a global game and with so many people
wanting so many different things from the game, so I think that’s an
important thing as well. I don’t know how many nationalities we have on
the game, but we have people from all over the world, and I think that
helps us make a game that is geared towards a global audience.
I think that’s a great point. Being well represented by many
nationalities within the FIFA Family of engineers and people that work
on the game must be important for the development of the game. – Yeah
it sparks debate here which is always healthy. We have an Argentinean
guy on the team who likes to put a lot of dirty things in the game.
Like when slide tackles weren’t allowed if the ball was in the air. We
were all like why would someone slide if the ball was in the air, but
he was like “no, no, no! If a guy is in the air you still want to be
able to bring him down.” So it helps in discussions but it also helps
in presentation and with understanding atmospheres. A South American
game is different than a game in the UK, and its different in Italy,
and Spain and in all the individual countries. So it helps us to have
this rich mixture of nationalities on the team to help us with these
things as well. For me coming from the UK you don’t always understand
the kind of cultural significance of football in the different
nationalities and I think that’s very important for us.
I think so too.
As you know, all of us soccer fans can be pretty picky and if one thing
is off within the game it becomes a very big deal. How do you guys
approach this when designing the game? – We do have resources at our
disposal. We have community forums and in the last year EA Sports as a
whole has made a big deal about reaching out to the community and to
have conversations with them like we’ve never had before. We had a
policy before where the development team weren’t allowed to speak to
the community for various reasons, but now that’s a very open door
policy. Now you will see that the dev teams are on the forums
communicating with the members of the community. As far as FIFA goes,
we have relationships with key community members and we bring them over
to the studio midway through development and we show them the game and
we get a great chance to speak with them. I actually got an email this
morning from one of the UK community guys and I’m going to set up a
conference call with them and they are going to run me through a list
of things that they would like to see changed in the game. The game has
been released in Europe for over a month and they’ve been playing
pretty hard core, so they have this list of features they want to talk
about. So if you can reach out to the community and have those
conversations and have those relationships then you can maybe try and
understand more what the fans want. But it’s almost an impossible task
to try and please everyone. Some people want us to concentrate on the
match day atmosphere, where there are a lot of people that just want
game play and don’t really care about these other things, then there
are other people who care passionately about manager mode. There are so
many different avenues we could explore. I think the dev team has to
look at all of these and try to prioritize what are the most important
things to build for the largest amount of people. We’re never going to
satisfy everyone, but hopefully people can see that we are trying our
best to make the game that they want to play.
Satisfying everyone is an impossible task! You brought up the new
community involvement initiative from EA Sports where the development
team gets involved and interacts with the community. Regardless of the
business or product, brands seem to really be trying to engage their
fans or consumers, and making them a part of the process, and this
seems to be the case for EA Sports. – Yeah definitely. I think a few
years ago at FIFA, community feedback was important for us, but not as
important as it is now. Two or three years ago we knew that the game
was rated 80, 82, 83 and it was obvious for us where we needed to go to
improve it. The dev team, we kind of had the guts of what we knew was
the vision so we didn’t really need that much feedback because we knew
where we were going. But now we’re kind of almost reaching the pinnacle
and we need to start exploring more avenues so it’s more important to
us now. And we have more time to devote to smaller features because the
game fundamentally works and is fundamentally strong and so I think for
us it’s very important for those reasons. But it’s also very important
in general. With things like Facebook, Twitter and message forums, it
is important to stay connected with people, and I think the community
expects this from us as well.
As an extension of that, we want our
product to be not just something we sell and forget, but something that
we sell and continue to develop throughout the year. I don’t know if
you know about our Live Season feature. What happens with Live Seasons
is that the game can get modified every single week depending on what
happens in the real world. Say Rooney scores a hat trick on the
weekend, if you have the Live Seasons subscription, you can download
his new stats and his new form for his game for how he played at the
weekend. So the game is dynamically changing all the time. We want to
extend the experience of FIFA throughout the year and that is something
we are very keen to do. We’ve got online tournaments with FIFA
interactive World Cup, this year we’ve got the pro club championship
which is like our 10 v 10 competition and these things extend
throughout the whole year. So its important for us to be in
communication with the consumer throughout the whole year and keep them
engaged in our product and keep getting the feedback that they are
giving us. These are very important elements in how we manage our
relationships with our consumers.
You
mentioned that the game is much more dynamic now. The product that you
ship isn’t necessarily the product that it ends up being, with you guys
constantly updating the game throughout the year. It’s almost like a
living organism. – We obviously release it at the start of the football
season and the football world is a living dynamic thing that chances
every week. So for us with FIFA, we want to mimic that and keep people
engaged in our world of football throughout the year. For authenticity
sake, we want to mimic what’s happening in the real world of football
and keep people engaged in our product in a fun and authentic manner
the whole year. We get our lead example of what’s happening from the
real world and football is a thing that changes all the time so we try
to do that as well.
It’s amazing that technology is at a point where
that is even possible. With making changes and updates and developing
the game as its already been released, how much of a problem does that
present to you and the development team? – I think it adds to the
challenge. Inherently FIFA is a challenge because football is a
seasonal game. Every year we are expected to release, a game so that in
itself gives us a finite amount of time to make changes. Thankfully the
execs at EA have given FIFA a large team of people to make those
changes so we can still make significant changes year on year. Even
from a base point of view, developing a game every year is a challenge
in itself. Most games have a little longer than a year to develop, so
that in itself is a challenge. Add on top of that the dynamic nature of
football, which we want to mimic, and the way we want to keep the game
fresh throughout the year, it adds on another layer of complexity. But
I think it’s a challenge that all of us here are excited about. Most of
the people here are passionate about football. I wouldn’t say everyone
is, we have some really smart technical people who aren’t football
maniacs, but they like football.
It’s interesting to see some of the
people here learn about football and get interested in it. We’ve got a
couple engineers here who weren’t football fans at the start, but they
started getting into it and then even started playing football on our
field here at the stadium. They started playing more and asking about
tactics and getting more into it. I think having people like that on
the team helps us keep the game fresh as well. Having people with
different backgrounds and different levels of understanding of the game
helps us to understand what we can put in the game to keep it fresh.
Back to the challenge of FIFA, we knew where we needed to go before our
game was rated a 90. We knew what we needed to do to get to a 90. Now
that we are a 90 where do we go from here? We have to keep the game
fresh and exciting but we don’t want to break what we have. So it’s a
challenge for us to decide how do we get from 90 to 91 and 92. It’s a
new and exciting challenge for us but we’re definitely very excited
about it and it’s a nice place to be.
You
mentioned that some of the more tech guys weren’t football fans, but
through working on the game they became fans of the sport. I have
friends of mine who were never soccer fans, but then they started
playing FIFA and the video game was the catalyst for them to become
actual fans of the sport.– That’s really great to hear! I think once we
started creating a great video game it crossed the realm from being
just a sports simulation to being a really fun and entertaining game.
When FIFA was maybe in the mid 80’s range of Metacritic, maybe the game
only appealed to people really interested in football. But once it gets
in to the 90 Metacritic, at that point, people who are just gamers
start giving it a chance because it’s bound to be good. So new people
will start playing it and they will find it enjoyable and challenging
so they will like it from a game point of view, but that can kind of
build a liking for the sport as well. I’ve never really heard many
people mention that before, so its really quite nice to hear. Maybe we
can start getting royalties for whatever teams they start to support!
It’s funny you mention that. My friends that have become fans of the
sport via FIFA, end up supporting in real life the team that they play
with in the game. I actually think it’s a great medium for people to
get introduced to the sport. Some people who are new to the sport have
difficulty in sitting down for 90 minutes and watching a game when they
don’t understand the intricacies of it. But something like FIFA, it can
be a much easier way to digest the sport for people who might not be
dedicated fans of the sport. As a result of that you can become a fan
through alternate mediums, as opposed to just sitting and watching a
game. I think this works particularly well in introducing new fans to
the sport in the United States. – That’s interesting. I think what
you’re saying is that by playing the game you start to understand how
difficult and how challenging certain things are with the sport. Or how
rewarding certain things are. So when you begin to understand some of
the intricacies by playing the video game then when you watch the game
it becomes more interesting to you. What I’ve heard before is that the
low scoring in soccer doesn’t really appeal to American sports fans.
But maybe if they understand the depth of the sport then they can
appreciate something like a passing play that resulted in a shot but
not necessarily a goal. So maybe it becomes more enjoyable for them as
they begin to understand the game better. That’s a really interesting
take on it.
Yeah, I mean if someone is playing the video game and they
start to better understand the small things like runs off the ball, or
keeping possession and building play through midfield, and how
important these things are. I think this helps people appreciate the
sport on a different level. It’s amazing that technology and something
as fun as FIFA can actually be tools to help create new fans. That’s
pretty remarkable. – Hopefully it helps. It would be great to see
football become bigger in the United States. FIFA has been doing well
in the United States recently, so maybe we can help each other drive
fans to the sport. It would be great for football to have a bigger
presence in North America.
~Sam@bluesombrero.com
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