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EA's Moore on Overwatch and their esports competition

"A lot of our games need a lot of features built in to catch up."

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During Gamelab we had the chance to discuss all things esports with EA's Chief Competitive Officer, Peter Moore, and the executive opened up when talking about his company's current plans and infrastructure, at the same time as citing some examples of how the competition got things right before them.

"We're not in denial - a lot of our games need a lot of features built in to catch up with what gamers are now looking for", Moore openly admits, "and to the credit of what Riot and Valve have done over many, many years. Have games purpose-built to be games that you would play as esports games almost in their entirety."

Indeed, Moore had even more compliments for the latest and hottest team-based craze, with EA using that as a reference point: "Congratulations to Activision and Blizzard on what they've done recently, in particular we look at Overwatch as maybe one of these games going forward here that is the future, that also feels like it's been built with esports primarily in mind".

Then Moore looked back at EA's competitive back catalogue and analyses which areas have to be improved, as well as which features must be implemented or taken into account:

"I prefer to call this competitive gaming because I think sports can be confusing and our top sports games have a very important part of competitive gaming", Moore explains in order to not mix up terms. "But we've got a lot of work to do with FIFA and Madden and NHL to make them true competitive gaming games".

The CCO mentions the importance of matchmaking platforms, anti-cheating mechanisms, different game modes, spectator mode, "share your great results," in-game leaderboards, ladders, tournaments, "so that you're not going out of games to the web to look at it."

And the man from EA offers up a pretty nice American sports analogy regarding the current esports scene, both for EA and the industry: "It's well underway but it's not happening overnight", says Moore regarding their own efforts. "We're in Superbowl 2 or 3 in competitive gaming right now."

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