As you may have seen, earlier this week we were proud to announce our continued sales success with
FIFA 10. We've sold more than 4.5million copies around the world and we're the No. 1 selling game in Europe. I can't say enough about the quality of this year's product and am thrilled the game has been so well received. I've been involved in some major franchises during my career in this industry, but I can't think of one that has had the global impact that FIFA has provided over the past couple of years. Shooters (of which I've been involved with a couple over the years) are typically not annual titles, and thus the development team is not under the same pressure to deliver true innovation on such a compressed timetable. Not the case with our sports development teams, and in this particular instance the FIFA team, who this year delivered what one critic called the "greatest soccer game ever made" .
What's equally impressive to me is the overwhelming appetite for online play - a real signal of why our continued move to digital that you've heard about for months is so critical for our future. We're seeing more than
three million FIFA game sessions happening
daily on average and a total of more than 113 million overall since we launched in early October. There's no longer a question of whether or even when we'll see the massive migration of sports fans online - now it's just a matter of what we do with it and how we continue to innovate. How do we continue to provide fans experiences that will have them log on and compete across borders and how do we build business models that can help us sustain this game-changing way to experience interactive entertainment? I distinctly remember being excited back in the Dreamcast/Seganet days when we cracked the 1,000 daily games played (via dial-up modem) on all of our sports games combined. How far we have come...
One way to continue this online growth is developing modes post launch like FIFA 10 Ultimate Team. Available for download in February for both XBOX 360 and PS3, Ultimate Team is the follow-up to last year's hit mode and it's become a much more dynamic and in-depth mode, based largely on the feedback we've incorporated from fans of last year's release. We're also bringing the Ultimate Team concept to Madden in January and we have an opportunity to continue to expand this to even more products in the future.
My eyes were peeled to this morning's World Cup draw , and as we all know by now, the US and England have been together with Slovenia and Algeria in Group C. While both teams should feel confident qualifying for the round of 16 from what is hardly a "group of death", there are never any guarantees in the Finals, and as an Englishman with faint memories of 1966, I always approach World Cup's with optimism that this will be the year mixed with the dread of a penalty shoot out that has left us so emotionally scarred over the years. But this could be the best equipped England team in decades, the weather won't be a factor (a rare winter World Cup), and maybe, just maybe we can break the 44-year drought...
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