A Sporting Chat With Peter Moore

7/31/2008 6:19 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 7

Crispy Gamer: Is this DNA concept something you're only going to keep solely with the NBA titles, or is this something you're planning on expanding out to the rest of your sports titles?

Moore: Each sport is different so it's a question a lot of people are asking. Every time a game is played, NBA Live changes. We can do Dynamic DNA in [the] NBA because the data is being gathered. A company that we're contracting is gathering the data anyway for teams, for statistical analysis for competitive reasons. It's very labor-intensive to gather all that data, but it's there. So we sat down with the company about a year ago and thought it was very interesting. As we saw yesterday, when Paul Pierce goes to the top of the key, they are tracking what he's going to do next, and the success rate of that. And that was being provided to general managers of NBA teams the next day. So the credit goes to Brent Nielsen, who was on stage with me, who said, "Boy, wouldn't it be interesting if we put that into the game?" That's how these things come about.

Basketball is different from hockey, different from soccer, different from American football, in that the tendencies are different and the behavior is different. In some sports it's the coach that pretty much determines everything and it's a little bit out of the hands of the player himself. The NFL is one of the most likely victims in that whole thing in that, when the coach says that the quarterback is going to throw into the flat, then the tendencies aren't really there.

But the answer is yes, we're going to look at each sport. We might look at the data in a more customized way, but yes, if we can get the telemetry and the data analysis and we can have each game made fresh daily, even though a lot of games are only played on weekends, we'll certainly be looking to do that.

Crispy Gamer: Roster updates seem to be something that is lacking.

Moore: No, we do roster updates...

Crispy Gamer: Well, you're making it fresh daily in basketball, but roster updates on more of a weekly basis, is that something that you're thinking of doing? Things change a lot in sports like hockey or football, for example.

Moore: I don't know if they need to be updated on a weekly basis, because there are trade windows. One of the things you can argue is serious injuries. Players should leave then. Madden does it three or four times during the season. There is client-side stuff you can do, if you can figure out how to do it. It's a matter of getting the data. This is not trivial work. So basically in the NBA you've got -- I don't know the number -- a half a dozen people watching every NBA game, every night. They have to document the data, the data has to be digitized, and we have to then convert that into where we are in the game and then move it down.

But soccer is different. A lot of work in soccer -- there are 22 players on the field. There are 700-plus teams in FIFA. Boy, that seems like a lot of work. Hockey could be next. I'm not a huge hockey fan but I do like hockey, and I do know enough about hockey to understand that when particular players bring the puck up the ice that's no different than when a player brings a ball up a court. How things set themselves up and around the goals. We'll look at this.