According to company head honcho and Satan lookalike Peter Moore, EA Sports has finally solved the age-old problem of how to combine sports, women, and video games, and thereby tapped into the female gaming market.

"We're finally talking to girls," he told an audience at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival this morning. It probably seemed like a tall order to the crowd. There are plenty of female gamers nowadays, yes, but they are definitely not the majority. And I don't know about you readers, but most of the girls I know would object to playing a game based on the ancient enemy of girlfriends, professional sports.

He went on to discuss how.

“It was a challenge. How do we go after this audience? How do we talk to women? We had no idea. The only time our testosterone-fuelled business talked to women was about games for their boyfriends, sons or fathers. It was scary. We felt we had nothing that would appeal to a female gamer. But now some figures say up to 40 per cent of all gamers are female, so we had to address it using our game engines, the great EA Sports brand – and by re-thinking the way we want to market.”

Apparently, their rethinking was based on Moore's career at Reebok, and ended up targeting the housewife.

“When I was at Reebok years ago, we took some plastic and made it into a step. We bundled it with a great video and told people it would enhance their workout at home, which it did. We had a $150 million business within a year.

“We had to go after a similar niche with EA Sports Active, appealing to women – who probably spent their days at home looking after the kids, and who didn’t have the time or money for the gym. We spotted this rise in health, wellness and fitness gaming early. We reached 1.8 million sales in its first month – and we’re changing people’s lives as well."

He concluded: “We’re finally talking to girls. We finally have women as part of the EA Sports community. It’s not a franchise, but a full platform for us going forward. It compliments the Wii Balance Board.

“As Americans would say, it kicks your ass. You know about it after spending 25 minutes on it [the board].”

Getting women interested in gaming through an interactive household workout center, huh? It makes sense. If anything was going to bring adult women into the gaming community, I can see it being this, and not this. And never, ever this.

Greg

Labels: EA, EA Sports, Greg Mengel

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