Game marketing guru makes an art of being a good sport

By PETER GRIFFIN

Video game marketing guru Don Transeth knows not to make jokes about sports he doesn't know how to play.

That's because his company, Electronic Arts, is sooner or later likely to end up making a video game based on the sport.

"I don't joke about sumo, because there's a chance we'll make that game as well," says Transeth.

EA's vice-president of marketing and brand innovation, Transeth is a 25-year veteran of the gaming industry. He has seen all the major consoles come and go and sold games titles on all of them.

In the early '90s he helped set up the division that EA has become best known for, EA Sports, which now makes games based on dozens of sports, from American football and soccer to Nascar motor racing and rugby. "If it's in the game - it's in the game", goes the EA tagline.

These days, the average game put out by EA, which for the past 12 years has held between 30 and 50 per cent of the sports gaming market, is likely to have several minutes of full-motion animation, the budget of a mid-sized Hollywood movie and a marketing campaign to match. But are games any more enjoyable to play these days?

It's a question Transeth takes a long time to answer.

"In the early days the graphics were blocky and the game play crude but the enjoyment still very high at the end of the experience," he says finally.

Nevertheless, gaming is still about imagination. Gamers are just presented with more to feed the imagination.

"You read a great book, it has zero graphics but your mind takes you to some thrilling places," he explains.

Those thrilling places have been in sports for EA. Madden and FIFA are the bumper titles, but EA has been branching out in its quest for international sales.

It added rugby to its line-up, a version of which will be released next month, in time for the Rugby World Cup. An EA cricket game will follow.

"We've been very good at North American sports, but we've made a lot of games that don't matter," says Transeth of EA Sport, which developed as EA decided to churn out fewer titles, but make them better.

Originally called the EA Sports Network, the division ruffled the feathers of pay TV sports network ESPN.

"Within a year, ESPN had sued us. We dropped the name and in return they gave us a seven-figure TV credit [to spend on advertising]," says Transeth.

In 2001, he began developing EA's "Big" brand. It did away with the calculated accuracy of the sporting simulations and let gamers have more fun.

Hence a popular range of wrestling, snowboarding and basketball titles that feature surreal, arcade-type graphics and over-the-top action.

"NBA Street is still a ball game, but the laws of physics are gone," says Transeth.

Outside sports, some of EA's biggest titles are adaptations of popular movies - The James Bond: 007 and Harry Potter franchises, not to mention The Lord of the Rings.

Gaming is now an industry rivalling the film industry in value yet increasingly dependent on it for success.

"In the movie business if you have a bad opening weekend you're cooked," says Transeth.

The same is true for games studios, who pay millions to secure the licences to put out games based on popular movies.

Video gaming is a buoyant and lucrative market, but Transeth has seen it drop before. In the early '80s gaming developers were riding high, until a deluge of dud games and a lack of console innovation stymied growth.

"It was a period of tremendous sales. The advertising budget at [games company] Activision in 1980 was US$40 million [$67.8 million]," he says.

"It seemed like the sky was the limit, then all of a sudden the industry created a glut of games people didn't care for."

Nintendo finally brought gaming back in the mid-80s.

The gaming industry is more competitive than then. EA faces formidable adversaries in Sega, Sony, Nintendo and a host of smaller developers. The humble gamer is presented with a vast array of titles.

"We're saying we'd like you to spend US$50 [$84] on a game, The customer is saying, 'Why, what's new?' " says Transeth.

In its quest to succeed outside the US, EA has attacked the Japanese market several times and learned hard lessons.

"Japan is an anomaly in the gaming world. They like Western culture, movies and music, everything except Western games," says Transeth.

It's a country where of the top 200 titles, only two or three will be from Western publishers. FIFA, which sells well worldwide, doesn't even surface there.

A fact which explains why Transeth is certainly making no jokes about sumo - it just may be EA's ticket to the most enthusiastic gaming market in the world.