You are listening to the Draper Fisher-Jervinson Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar,

brought to you weekly by a Stanford Technology Ventures program at Stanford University School of Engineering.

I'd like to cut to the chase and introduce our guest for today, Nick Earl, who's a vice president and general manager at Electronic Arts.

Prior to taking on this role, Nick was actually in charge of the Electronic Arts Redwood Shores studio as the chief operating officer and had very, very interesting games under his

responsibility and he's got a great lineup for us today. So Nick, we're really looking forward

to having you back at Stanford and look forward to sharing your insights with us. Let's welcome Nick Earl.

Thanks for having me. I know I'm competing with the Who tonight, so hopefully this will be as interesting for you guys.

I think the first thing I'm going to do is just start with a little video of some next-gen software,

and then we'll kind of jump into the content of the presentation.

Thank you. then we'll kind of jump into the content of the presentation. The The So that's just a little taste of some of the products that we are working on and are in the process of shipping.

We're the dawn of yet another generation of hardware systems out there,

and it's very time we're having this discussion today because so much is going on our industry.

And that's really what I'm going to focus on today, what is happening in the video game business,

and then talk a lot about the strategy that EA is bringing in order to deal with that because it's

just so much going on. So, 1982 is when Electronic Arts was founded. It was founded on the notion

of celebrating game makers as artists. It was really sort of a united artist's approach where

electronic arts was essentially going

to publish and distribute the creation from game makers.

The realities have sort of changed these days where it's really harder to do that.

Instead, I'd say we celebrate teams of game makers.

In 1982, one or two people could create a product.

Today it takes 100, sometimes 200 people to do it.

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