How Electronic Arts is responding to the esports explosion

Electronic Arts says that competitive gaming is naturally built into its multiplayer in titles such as Battlefield, Madden NFL, and FIFA. But the explosion in esports has caused the company to think long and hard about the opportunities for its games in the field of competitive gaming.

To address this challenge and opportunity, Matt Bilbey was named executive vice president for strategic growth at Redwood Shores, California-based EA. And after three major tournaments — Barcelona, EA Champions Spring Cup in Asia and Manchester — more than 20 million competitors engaged in the EA SPORTS FIFA 18 Global Series.

In some ways, EA is behind. Rivals such as Riot Games’ League of Legends, Valve’s Counter-Strike and Dota 2, and Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League have set up formal esports leagues to start cultivating and rewarding outstanding pros.

I sat down with Bilbey to talk about esports. EA has worked with outside esports companies such as tournament organizer ESL, and it is working on figuring out what it needs to do with streaming technology and interactivity. But Bilbey knows that EA needs to step up its investment in esports, and he is trying figure out the right structure for how EA will address esports in the future. One thing is for sure. the games have to be fun to both play and watch, he said.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How is the competitive gaming and esports front here?

Matt Bilbey: It’s good. I started my new job about two months ago now. I’ve been on the road for most of it. The week before last we were in Amsterdam for the last qualifying event for the eWorld Cup that’s happening in a few weeks’ time. I worked on FIFA as the GM of the FIFA business until three and a half years ago. I’m pretty familiar with how it all started, the FIFA Interactive World Cup.

What impressed me, and educated me as well, was the evolution of competitive gaming as it relates to a focus on viewers. In previous ones, when I worked on it, it was very much about putting on an event and driving as many people to be at the live event as possible. While it’s still very attractive for people to watch the live event, the pivot the team has made under Todd, to really focus on—obviously it’s always going to be about creating the best games for players to compete at the right level. But then adding in a broadcast component to allow viewing, whether it’s Twitch or YouTube or whatever your choice—I was blown away.

We had eight or nine commentators, and then studio hosts to really make the content of the event compelling for people to watch. It was on par with an NFL broadcast or a Premier League broadcast. Sitting with the team at the event and afterward, when we look at the opportunity with competitive gaming—at EA we’re looking at continuing to invest in Madden and Battlefield opportunities. But with FIFA—you can’t really view and enjoy something unless you understand what’s going on.

With soccer, football, pretty much anyone can watch it and understand what’s going on. The audience potential that has globally is huge. Certainly when we talk to our pro players within the sport, there’s a lot of excitement and energy around taking that to the next level. How can we take the FIFA business and competitive gaming and that pro level, whether it’s team-based or otherwise, into a broader league? That has an exciting, bright future ahead of it.

GamesBeat: I remember when Peter Moore said he was starting up the competitive gaming unit. He went around to a lot of studios and had conversations with them. It was going to take a while to work the idea of esports into the games – talking to developers, planting the seeds, and then a few years later you see how the games are different. It seems like that timeline is coming due now. I wonder what we should notice about how the games are now esports-ready.

Bilbey: I’d say that the very nature of many of our games – certainly sports and Battlefield – they have competition at their core. The progress we needed to make as a company is on many levels, but making sure you’re playing against the right level of person, and making sure you’re able to progress and see that progress—a big part of what Peter was referring to was being able to ensure that our games are created, to the point I made earlier, for viewing as well.

Certainly within all our sports games, like FIFA, you can view other people’s games. The road map of features—we’ve just launched FIFA Online 4 in Korea and China. That game has been developed with competitive gaming at its heart, with interactive broadcasting being a big part of it. That’s allowing gamers to actually curate their own broadcast component. We do understand that there are players and there are viewers, but then there’s a middle that wants to be involved in the broadcast and create their own content.

To meet the opportunity we have and that gamers are interested in, we need to look at it on many different levels. The in-game competition, like leveling and progression—sports is easier, certainly. With Battlefield, making sure you have the right length of game, the right size of maps, that took a bit more time. We’re now publicly testing the work that was done in Battlefield One. Peter’s view I think is pretty accurate from a timeline point of view. We probably added another couple of years on the end. Now we’ve learned more and we see the opportunity that lies ahead.

GamesBeat: On the interactive part, I talk a lot to a startup called Genvid. I don’t know if it’s similar to their tech, but it’s allowing you to do things like change to follow any view of any player that you want to follow in the game.

Bilbey: That’s the type of thing that interactive broadcast allows, but this is using our own engine technology.

GamesBeat: Does that also come with revenue opportunities? You could show very specific ads to someone who’s interested in a particular player. Getting to know the spectators has possibilities.

Bilbey: Within a lot of the work we’ve been doing as a company for a few years–historically our games have an identity system. There have been many different systems over the years at EA, but three years ago we underwent a project to have a consistent ID system, so that when you play FIFA or Battlefield, or even Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes on your mobile, we can see a view of you as a gamer, rather than three different people. That allows us to develop and curate a personality of experience for you.

FIFA now—for a while it’s understood who you support and when you play. But through the AI and the understanding – we call it PIN, Player Insight Network – it allows us to do things like, if you’re losing a certain game, we can adjust without you knowing to ensure you continue you have an enjoyable experience. Or if you get stuck on different parts. All of that is starting to develop that personality and understanding of you as a gamer and what you want out of your game so you have the most fun you can have.

GamesBeat: What do you know that you want to do with the professional team organizations now? That seems to be solidifying. They’re diving into things like Overwatch League, but they’ll have many teams within one organization.

Bilbey: As I mentioned, the opportunity we have with FIFA is probably bigger than any game that exists on the market today, just based on what I mentioned about the ease of understanding. We haven’t made any solid plans to go into that. But it would be a natural step. Certainly a lot of our players and teams are looking for it, as well as a lot of our partners, whether it’s FIFA, the Premier League, the Bundesliga. You never know.

GamesBeat: What does that give you guys to think about? What do you have to work out?

Bilbey: It’s really the structure more than anything else. The game’s ready for it. The progress has been made around that interactive broadcast technology, which would be a big part of it. It’s really about how we could do something that’s aspirational, but still accessible. We have a pyramid of our competitive gaming, which at the top is the very best in esports, the eWorld Cup. In many ways the same challenge and opportunity that sports leagues have, about how we could create something that still fits into the cadence of everything else going on in the sport. It’s a challenge that can be overcome. We’re just not quite there.

GamesBeat: It presents interesting things to think about. On something like the Las Vegas Strip, you could build an EA venue somewhere.

Bilbey: [laughs] The venues are very different from what we thought a venue would be two years ago. When we started thinking about venues for esports, it was a stage with 100,000 people watching. That may still be the case, but what we’ve learned is—take the event in Amsterdam. You have a stage and people there watching live, but the backstage, with the broadcast trucks, was there for TV-ready broadcast. If we were to go into a venue, it would very much need to be dual-purpose, or have the ability to create that content live.

The breadth of fans around the world that want to watch—just watching a five-minute half of a game, it would be interesting for a little while. But if you have, as we have now—the overlays on the broadcast show scores of other games, whether we’re connecting with Twitch or whatever, doing interactive drops into games that you’re playing at home. The commentators we have in studio at halftime cut to the sofa commentators that we now have. They can take a feed of the game, and one of the commentators can actually fast forward, rewind, and draw over the top of what happened in the first half to create strategic conversation. All of this really does take it into that engaging broadcast. A venue is not out of the question. What type, I think, has changed a lot in the last couple of years. It’s probably more in line with a TV studio.

People like going to these events. We have a great partnership with Nexon and Tencent. By all accounts, over the last five years, esports in Asia has probably been at the forefront. There’s something about going to an event with 50,000 people in the crowd. So we’re thinking dual purpose.

GamesBeat: Something like Anthem, it’s brand-new, but it seems to fall into this category where you can work esports into it, somewhere in the development cycle. I don’t notice anything in particular about that game that makes it more esports ready, but–

Bilbey: I’d say that while Anthem is a team-based game, esports has not been a focus or priority of that game design as it was created. There are other games—again, Battlefield is one we’ve spoken about. It’s in its nature, as we’ve released it historically. When I’m watching esports, the larger maps, too many players, it gets very confusing as far as what you’re doing or how you win. Oscar and that team have spent a lot of time at how we can redesign map size. We’ve learned a lot from the work we’ve done with Nexon to understand what length of game is right, what size of map.

But on Anthem, I would say that has not been a focus for that team. We have a game development framework, and we have a gate zero, which is, “Come up with an idea,” and then gate one, four to five months later, which is fleshing out that idea with features, with target audience. At that point we also ask a question about, “Is this going to have a competitive gaming focus?” We make sure there’s the right mix in our portfolio as well. Not everything is right for esports.

GamesBeat: The battle royale games, they don’t seem like obvious candidates for great esports either. It’s still just beginning, or going to begin. Watching 100 people square off against each other–

Bilbey: That’s the filter that I’d apply today. Is it fun to watch? Is it engaging for other people to watch? Whether they play the game or not–with many of the games that are successful in esports today, if you don’t play the game yourself it’s hard to understand what’s going on. I’d say there are many royale games out there that—I’ve watched quite a few, but you end up sticking with one person. I’m interested to see the event with Fortnite this week, how they curate that so you can follow it. I agree with your view. In its natural state, it’s hard for a viewer to follow that. But there’s certainly a lot of compelling, fun—we just need to come up with a compelling solution for it.

GamesBeat: What else is on your plate this week?

Bilbey: The purpose of taking over this role—we have different areas in the company that need to get more investment and accelerate our approach. Competitive gaming is one. Our strategy in Asia is another. Subscription and our platform, that’s another one. Right now those are the three big areas of focus. Focus is really the key word. It wasn’t that we weren’t doing anything on those before. It was just that they reported into someone where it was a tenth of their job.

My job now is to look at things and accelerate the path that we’ve just been talking about in competitive gaming. How do we get there in one year or 18 months instead of three years? How do we get Origin to a platform level where it really is best in class and ubiquitous, where it lives everywhere? How do we take that into Asia, where PC gaming in a premium form – PUBG, Fortnite, Overwatch – does play a role? Can subscription play a role? They’re really the focus areas. That’s taking up a lot of conversation that I’m having here.

Streaming is a big part of that subscription and platform conversation. Streaming has been a conversation since, what, eight or nine years ago? It’s back now. You can play it and feel it. I played FIFA next door on a smart TV, then paused and picked it up on a minimum spec laptop, then paused and picked it up on mobile. It’s very real. The technical hurdle that we need to overcome is the infrastructure, to make it accessible to a large amount of people in a cost-effective way. I don’t think we’re that far away from that. Then we’ll get to a place where the audience of gamers out there in the world will be 100 times what it is today.

GamesBeat: Would that mean you’d have to think about things like whether you want to own, with EA, television broadcasting or the mixer technology or other things that fill out the full ecosystem internally, so you can go out there with this? “Here’s a fully built-out unified approach to esports.”

Bilbey: It’s esports and beyond. The idea of having a solution to social – chatting in games, chatting outside of games – do we continue to build it ourselves, or do we leverage partners who have done it? The interactive broadcast I mentioned, we’re building our own solution, but there may be ways to bring in other options from outside to add more features.

Something that the games industry has started to see, that we’ll invest more in tomorrow than perhaps we did yesterday, is giving gamers the ability to create content themselves. Part of that could be content within our games, but a big part could also be content to deliver their own broadcast. I have an eight-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. Most of the content my daughter consumes is on YouTube Kids. It’s other girls and boys using video games in the background with their voice curating little TV shows.

There’s a very exciting opportunity for our gamers, and even beyond our gamers, to create content. That could be focused in the short term around competitive gaming. It could go far beyond that, whether it’s content to create their own programming or content to create their own games. When we talk to the Frostbite team and they talk about where our game engine will go in the future, that’s definitely in their thinking. It’s more than just delivering a game and playing it. There’s so much more content creation and social opportunity around that as well.

GamesBeat: It seems like in the future people will upload as much as they download.

Bilbey: I think there will be many people who aren’t playing games that end up playing with games. They won’t be competing against you or me, necessarily, but they’ll use the media delivery, the tools that we give them—whether it’s creating their own games, their own content, or their own TV shows, that’s going to be a big part of the future.

GamesBeat: Have you figured out the external environment in some way now, maybe reacting to a particular part of it? Some people say there’s too much hype around esports, but a lot of things I’m writing about now, on a weekly basis, are big things happening in that space. In the last year it’s seemingly exploded. There’s more opportunity now to make money or make progress without as much boiling-the-ocean sort of effort.

Bilbey: The acceleration of esports, certainly as it relates to our games, will come down to the point of, can people who are watching it on the TV or on the internet—how many people can follow what’s going on and be entertained? Certainly as it relates to FIFA, or Madden in North America—if we can create something that’s compelling to view, that would inspire, if we do it well, people who want to play and engage with it as well.

It could be just one way. I enjoy watching the best players in the world and the broadcast content component. But if we do our jobs right, I might want to take part in that, be part of that. Whether that’s at a casual level, or if I want to become a competitive player myself, that’s really the curve of acceleration I see.

GamesBeat: EA could one day replicate the whole NFL for esports, I guess.

Bilbey: It’s a point in time. Unless you play Madden in a completely different way, you’re not going to get concussed. [laughs] But it’s very true. I don’t think we’re ever going to replace real-world live sports. There’s just something about that. But there’s a way of allowing more people to take part, and giving a path for more people to grow and see themselves accelerate up that pyramid toward the pinnacle. Certainly with FIFA, some of the best players in the world are actually some of the best players on the pitch as well.

GamesBeat: You could have a Kinect-like interface for that.

Bilbey: We’ve asked questions about how AR and VR will work within FIFA and sports. We’ve had VR running with FIFA and our sports games. It’s not a consumer experience right now. But the notion of—whether it’s AR on a table in front of you, where you see a stadium render, whether you’re playing or just watching the eWorld Cup final, I think there are definitely options that will bring even closer engagement to what’s happening on the pitch.

You never know. We’re technology partners with the Premier League, with FIFA. We did some work—when we did that deal a few years ago, we looked at—inside most Premier League stadiums, and we have it in North America as well, there’s a camera setup that tracks individual players. They track them down to limb level. We set up many games where we took that feed of the broadcast and, in real time, rendered it through our game, so we could deliver the Manchester United versus Chelsea game through our product.

It was 95 percent accurate. However, that five percent is where people don’t believe it. The real problem was when players came close together. The limb data had to be manually taken apart. But if that was now, in 10 years, 20 years, the technology and the work we do making video games, and the work they do delivering that sport—it’s all going to get closer and closer. We’ll enhance each other.