Online gaming key to Asia-Pacific growth

END GAME: Electronic Arts hopes to ride the next gaming wave, says senior vice-president Jon Niermann.

Electronic Arts, the world's largest video games publisher, is looking to online gaming, cellphones and a new generation of video game consoles to fuel growth in the Asia-Pacific market.

Jon Niermann, EA's senior vice-president and managing director of Asia-Pacific game publishing, says there is US$3 billion ($4.34 billion) to US$5 billion worth of growth to be expected in the online gaming market alone in the next five years.

"Gaming is becoming more of a mainstream form of entertainment," he says.

"Casual gaming and new forms of online gaming are emerging."

Niermann, who was in New Zealand recently visiting the local arm of EA, says new gaming platforms such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 would re-energise the gaming industry next year with more advanced graphics.

Online gaming, in which people connect to computer servers to participate in multi-player gaming communities, will become more popular, he says.

EA already runs online gaming platforms such as The Sims Online and Pogo.com, which has about 800,000 paying subscribers. While EA was slow to adapt its games for Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming platform, many of its games are now available through the service.

Nevertheless, the company's preference is to build its own platforms, and as far as Asia-Pacific is concerned, that means opening game studios in key markets such as China, South Korea and Japan.

EA executives said recently the game publisher would trim the range of imported titles it sells in Japan and develop more games locally. Niermann says that strategy is based on the fact that in the Japanese market, "99 out of the top 100 games are Japanese".

EA has installed its first country manager in India and is getting into the Chinese market, which Niermann says is "somewhat of a pirate's paradise" at present.

As far as New Zealand is concerned, the relatively low level of broadband use has held back the development of online gaming platforms, though Xbox Live and comparable services for the PlayStation 2 are available.

"The good side is that there's a lot of growth potential in that area," Niermann says.

The second major area of development for EA is games for cellphones - not the clunky versions of Jawbreaker and Space Invaders that phones have hosted so far, but major, graphic-intensive titles.

At the E3 gaming expo held at Los Angeles in May, EA revealed that some of its major franchises - The Sims, Madden NFL and Fifa Football - will be released as cellphone games next year.

"It will be big next year. We'll have up to 20 games on the mobile," Niermann says.

The improvements in cellphone screen resolution and the size of onboard memory have made them more suitable for gaming.

"It's not a huge undertaking. We do a special port of the games for the mobile, with some changes to make the mobile game unique," he says.

EA plans to strike deals with cellphone operators to provide the games to customers over the type of third-generation networks that Telecom and Vodafone both now have. Some games may also be embedded into handsets by the manufacturer.

No titles have been announced for New Zealand mobile networks yet.

Niermann seems to have avoided a recent management reshuffle announced at EA, following disappointing financial results. Top executives Don Mattrick and Bruce McMillan leave the company.

EA has annual revenue of more than US$3 billion.

*Jon Niermann

Who: Electronic Arts senior vice-president and managing director of Asia-Pacific game publishing.

Favourite gadget: Sony PSP.

Next big thing: Online gaming. EA is building its own online gaming platform above and beyond those games that are already available over existing platforms such as Xbox Live.

Alternative career: He says he can't think of what else he would be doing.

Spare time: Generally family time.

Favourite sci-fi movie: The original Star Wars, although he also likes the latest, Revenge of the Sith.