In a conversation with EA chief operating officer Peter Moore, we learned some new details about Titanfall's performance. Unfortunately, the number of copies sold wasn't one of them.
Titanfall has been incredibly strong on Xbox One according to Moore. "Sales are always going to be inhibited and governed by the install base, but [Titanfall] is attaching incredibly well," he says. "Titanfall is the best selling title on Xbox One lifetime to date."
We also asked Moore about the transitions going on in the industry, including a shift to mobile, digital, and the new console cycle. Moore recounts his first meeting as an EA employee in 2007, led by former CEO John Riccitiello. "It was known as the burning platform meeting," he told us. "[Riccitiello] laid out what the challenges for the industry were going to be. We had seen this with music. We were starting to see it with movies. We were starting to see new phones. That was enough to see a little bit of smoke on the horizon. John had the vision to say, 'We've got to change ourselves and start to really diversify what we do.'"
Moore points out that the industry in the late 2000s was dominated by large publishers, and it was immensely challenging for new competitors to succeed. "The barrier to entry in 2007, when it was tough to compete with companies like ourselves and Activision has come down radically. A guy in Vietnam can make Flappy Bird and it's the lead story on CNN. If you can swipe an index finger, you're a gamer nowadays, and that's a huge opportunity for us. We see it as a big funnel that just continues to widen."
EA is an enormous entity though, and making change isn't easy. "When I got into this industry, there was a long line of publishers that I used to deal with that are now longer with us. They just couldn't handle the transitions. They didn't go digital. They didn't think that mobile was where they needed to be. The world of publishing is a very different group than when I took over [at EA]."
