EA Mobile's Euro boss Javier Ferreira talks to Pocket Gamer

Electronic Arts is the undisputed 800-pound gorilla of the console games business, and although it faces stiffer competition from the mobile industry – Gameloft rivals it in size here in Europe – there's no doubt that in 2006, EA Mobile had a blinder. That 12 of EA Mobile's games were in ELSPA's top 50 chart for the year tells a story.

Javier Ferreira has been EA Mobile's head honcho ever since the publisher acquired his previous company Jamdat Mobile at the start of 2006. We sat down with him for a lengthy interview to talk about the past, present and future for EA Mobile.

In fact, it was so lengthy that we've broken it into two parts!

Today: why attempts to just port console games onto mobile are doomed to fail and why it's not a problem that mobile gamers prefer brands to original titles. Tomorrow: you'll have to come back to see!

I think there's two reasons. First, the platform's getting better, so consumers are reacting more positively to that experience. For example, we're selling more and more copies of FIFA every year, because more consumers have handsets where it's very enjoyable to play that kind of game. So the platform is evolving.

Secondly, a lot of console brands in the past were brought to mobile in a not very good way. They were licensed out to other companies, and came out long after the console launch. This year we've really turned that around, so we've got great games, and we've given them a lot of marketing exposure, not just on the operator portals, but through other channels too, including EA's own.

We've always had this dichotomy of console gamers versus casual gamers, and it's simply false.

What we have is a very broad range of consumers looking for a good gaming experience. We know that there is a mass-market group of people who are gamers. In the UK we're talking about 30 per cent or 40 per cent of the population playing console games. These should be the easy target: the first people that should be playing mobile games.

The industry has thought a lot about expanding the audience for mobile gaming by reaching out to a wider audience. And we've done that with games like Scrabble, Pictionary and Bejeweled. But this core group of consumers who play console games, we've got to get them into mobile gaming.

Yes, absolutely. If you try to take console gameplay and fit it onto a mobile, you're gonna fail. You've got to understand the mobile platform and develop specifically for it, and that's one thing that Jamdat brought to EA Mobile.

Every single game we develop aims to take the spirit of the original brand – what EA calls 'The X' – and be true to that, while delivering something that's specifically targeted for mobile. Even when that means gameplay that is significantly different from the same game on console.

If you look at the ELSPA charts, you can see that the biggest category of games is console IP, which tells you that a lot of people who play those games on console have now downloaded the mobile games.

It's not surprising though. We've always had this myth that console games are niche and mobile games are mass-market, but actually it's the other way around. FIFA is a truly mass-market brand that's extremely well recognised in the UK, and a lot of those people are downloading those kind of games on mobile.

Then you have the more casual game experiences, but again, we're not reinventing the wheel, as you have online gaming on the Web. So EA has launched our Pogo website in the UK, which has been very successful, and a lot of people playing on Pogo are also downloading mobile games.

The other big trend is that brands are becoming more and more important. In the ELSPA Top 50 chart, there were very few games that were not using IP from some other media platform. Mobile-specific propositions are struggling at the moment...

I think because people like brands. That's a reality of consumer culture. Brands bring a predictability, and certain values that people like to interact with. Whereas stuff that you don't know... well, you don't know it, so you're less likely to be interested. That's a condition of human nature, and I don't see why it would be a bad thing.

It's only bad if you're using brands to lie to consumers, trying to sell them a brand when the game underneath it is disappointing. But in terms of quality, mobile gaming is getting better every month. So people respond more positively to brands, and if the products behind those brands are good, then I think that's good for everybody.

Absolutely. Look, I think great products are always going to have an audience. As you said, we're working on it, and we'll continue working on that, and bringing own-IP products that are innovative, exciting and trying to push the platform forward.

But by definition, it's always going to be more difficult to make those games successful. You need word of mouth, but to achieve that word of mouth, mobile gaming has to be more popular. Normally, word of mouth only really works when about 20 per cent of the population is doing something. Otherwise it stays niche. So without more people playing, the viral element won't work.

Of course, the alternative is for a publisher to spend millions on an advertising campaign, but the kind of revenues we're making from these games doesn't allow any publisher to do that. It's more a Jamster thing!