BC Business
Coming off a rough year at EA, new boss Paul Lee is preparing to hit the restart button at the video game giant.
You’d think a guy with 4,000 game developers under him and studios in Orlando, Chicago, L.A., Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Montreal and Burnaby would be a bit of a homer when it comes to video-game picks – but apparently not. Sitting in his aquarium-adorned, 20th-floor office above Coal Harbour, the new boss of Electronic Arts Worldwide Studios admits his favourite game isn’t one of the 31 titles his US$3.1-billion company makes; instead, it’s World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game produced by Blizzard Entertainment, a division of EA rival Vivendi Universal. “It’s an awesome game,” says Paul Lee, 41. “I just wish EA was a little along that same path.” Moving the company in that direction is now what fills his 90-hour weeks, he says, before taking a sporting jab at Don Mattrick, his pal since Grade 8, who stepped away from the top spot at EA in September to ‘pursue other opportunities,’ leaving Lee holding the bag. Principals together in Distinctive Software, which they sold to EA for US$11 million in 1991, the Burnaby boys had essentially been partners for the past 18 years. “We still talk every couple of days,” says Lee, a father of three, whose thrill at scoring the big office seems deeply buried beneath a self-effacing shtick. (So self-effacing, in fact, that even consenting to be interviewed required months of cajoling.) “Let’s just say that EA has got such talent that any sucker could come in and do the job.” That work now revolves around taking US$20-million gambles on games that need to be as realistic and ‘believable’ as movies, yet still allow the consumer to control the graphics and create new storylines on the fly. But instead of burning through $1-million-a-minute Hollywood budgets, EA’s developers need to do it on barely one-sixtieth of that. When it works, like it has with smash hits Madden NFL and Tiger Woods PGA Golf, the results are cash cows that can be rolled out to a devoted following annually without heading back to the drawing board. When it doesn’t, because of fierce competition from Vivendi and others, the upshot is a warning that sales will be “well below” target, an admission EA was forced to make in December. Alas, the phrase ‘well below target’ wasn’t one Mattrick heard very often, but EA can remain assured the new boss isn’t underestimating the threat. He knows there’s a world of warcraft out there.