How is Electronic Arts--arguably the biggest name in video gaming--leveraging the wealth of riches offered by the iPhone and iPod touch? We spoke with EA’s main iPhone boss, Travis Boatman, Vice President of Worldwide Studios, for the straight dish on his company’s iPhone development efforts. EA has already partnered with Apple to deliver games to the clickwheel iPod, but what do the touch-feely iPhone and iPod touch offer game developers?

As of this posting, EA has already released touch-controlled versions of Tetris, Scrabble, Sudoku and Spore. It has also announced Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, Need for Speed Undercover, SimCity and The Sims 3. So what are the when, whys and hows of this eclectic (and big-name) mix?

You can read more about Travis Boatman in out Top 10 Apple Influencers of 2009 article, but for now, let’s just focus on the fruits of his dev team’s labor…

EA’s Relationship With Apple

Mac|Life: What’s it like working with Apple? Do you have a dedicated department within Apple that you coordinate with?
Travis Boatman: Not within Apple, but we have a dedicated group here in Mobile that just focuses on building games and partnering with Apple. We have people that partner with Apple from a sales and distribution perspective, who welcome [feedback on] pricing and how to position our titles in the market. And then we also have teams, both internally and externally, that manage production—that build games just for the iPhone.

M|L: And then Apple has final say on which games get published?
TB: No, what’s interesting about the iPod business versus the iPhone business is that with the iPod business, Apple does have the final say, and they only release a certain amount of games for the iPod—the clickwheel iPods. But the iPod touch is really in the iPhone category. On the iPhone and the touch, it’s more of an open market. There’s a little bit of oversight by Apple to make sure they don’t launch what they call “malicious applications,” but outside of that, pretty much anybody can distribute any kind of content they want on the platform, which is why you’re seeing so many applications out there in such a short period of time.

M|L: How does Apple define malicious applications?
TB: Um, oh boy, well they have a whole checklist on how they do that. I think that’s available publicly, but I probably shouldn’t quote it. They have a list of things they consider malicious and you can’t do any of those things—pornography, viruses, or hacking the operating system. They’re basically trying to protect consumers from any kind of malicious activity.

M|L: One notorious app is Pull My Finger. People were upset when Apple rejected it. Do you have any insight into what category of malicious applications that Pull My Finger might fit into?
TB: Greed. I think from EA’s perspective, we haven’t had any problems [with rejected apps]. We’re traditionally from the mobile space. We’re focused on very mass market, accessible titles, and so we haven’t run into any issues associated with malicious oversights from Apple.

The Strengths & Weaknesses of the Touch Platform

Mac|Life: What’s the best thing about developing for the iPhone? What makes it great or inviting to develop for?
TB: You’ve got a great device—a touch screen, a fast processor, lots of memory. Then, outside of the hardware itself, they’ve got great software, using OS X. They also have a great tool set for developing applications and debugging the software. Then the last bit is iTunes, an excellent, excellent storefront—great merchandising, great consumer reviews, great visibility, searchable. You can search over the air, and you can search over the PC. So it’s a great shopping experience for consumers. Everything lines up—the hardware, the software development, and the storefront.

M|L: You had been designing games for the clickwheel iPod. So when you first saw the iPod touch and iPhone—when you saw how they were going to work—did any pluses and minuses for game development really stand out?
TB: Yes, there’s a couple things. First, where the touch excels versus the clickwheel, again, is in the software development platform. For the iPhone and touch, they’re using a very mature set of tools and software stack that haven’t yet been implemented on the clickwheel iPod. Development is much, much easier on the iPhone and the touch.

The second thing that’s so well done on the iPhone and the touch is that if you just look at the device, you can visualize in your head, “There are no buttons. It’s a blank slate.  There’s really nothing on the screen.” That’s compelling for game builders because you can create any interface you want, for any kind of game you make. If you have a hardware interface, you’re constrained by the hardware—you have to make a game that uses that piece of hardware. So when we first started working the touch interface, that freedom was really exciting.

M|L: And negatives?
TB: When we were doing the early R&D with Apple, we could have chosen a whole number of games to work with. EA has a great library of properties. But we chose Spore because it’s such a varied game between game play and the creature career. When we started playing with the device, we said, “Wouldn’t this be fun to be able to just use your fingers to play with these creatures in the world.” What we learned right away was that it’s great to use the touch screen to play with the Spore creatures—move stuff around with your fingers, drag with the eyes, paint with your fingers, and have fun with it. We found that to be really enjoyable, and Spore was a perfect fit for that.

But the other thing we learned right away in early R&D is that you can’t use the touch screen for a lot of the action games, because if your fingers obscure the scene when you’re trying to play an action game, you can’t play the game. So we immediately switched over to using the accelerometer [for action play]. I think everyone would’ve come to that same conclusion, but when we first started, we realized that to control the spore, we’ve got to get our fingers away from the screen. So we started playing with the accelerometer, and we found out that was a really fun way to play.

M|L: We love the accelerometer! There’s so much there. And so many developers are excited about it.
TB: What’s interesting about the accelerometer is that, oftentimes, when you force people to use new tools and technologies, they come up with really creative ways of approaching a problem. I’ll kind of direct that toward the Nintendo DS and the Wii—these unique interfaces that maybe aren’t as accurate as a button press. But then people design games around them, and they make these interesting new experiences which are often more compelling.

The accelerometer won’t ever be as accurate as a button press by the very nature of how people move. But what developers do is they design games that are a little bit less about accuracy, and more about intuitive play and motion. And as long as the game is designed that way, it often becomes more compelling to play. The Nintendo DS and the Wii show that.

Apple vs Nintendo vs Sony

M|L: The iPhone has been deemed more powerful than the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Do you guys have ideas on how you’re going to harness that power going forward?
TB: To say it’s more powerful is a tricky thing because they’re very different. I’m not skirting the question, but it would be a little bit like asking, “Is the Wii less powerful of a platform than the Xbox 360?” You start to argue, “One has faster processors, one has a different type of UI.” You can kind of sort of mix and match those, but at the end of the day, the question really becomes, “Is it a compelling play experience?”

I think all three devices actually provide really great play experiences. How they’re different, though, is what’s important. I think, fundamentally, the DS and the PSP are decisions. And what I mean by decisions is, when you’re going to jump on an airplane, you say, “I’m going to pack my Nintendo DS.” So you grab your charger and your cartridges, you pack it all together, and you go on your trip. It’s a very focused kind of experience when you decide to play those games.

Now, with any kind of phone—the iPhone included—it’s not really a decision. It’s with you all the time. It’s ubiquitous. So at that moment you think, “Yeah, I’d like to play a game,” you just take it out of your pocket and start playing. I think that’s one of the first fundamental differences. One platform is a phone. It’s with you all the time. The other platforms are decisions.

M|L: But how about the amount of memory available, the speed of the processors—how does that compare?
A: They’re all slightly different. Some have more memory than others, some have more storage space than others. But they’re all relatively on par with each other in different ways. You know, the Sony PSP—don’t quote me on the numbers here—I think the UMD on the back of the PSP, the little disc, is around 1.5 gigabytes, around that range. The Nintendo DS, their cartridges range up to 256 megabytes, but you can either go small or large depending on the development. Now, the current ceiling for iPhone applications is around 125 megabytes.

So, you could argue that 125 megs [for the iPhone game] is either larger or smaller than a DS cartridge, depending on which cartridge the DS publisher decided to use. And you could argue that the iPhone [maximum game size] is smaller than a PSP cartridge size, but because the iPhone is very connected, by its very nature, you could continue to download content over time, if you choose to build a game that way.

The iPhone actually offers 8 to 16 gigs of space, so conceivably you could put an 8 gig game on the iPhone, if Apple allows you to download something that large. This is larger than the PSP, and that’s why I say it’s kind of a tricky comparison because there really are a lot of differences between the platforms. At the end of the game, you can create compelling games on all three.

Future Development

M|L: So you just announced a whole bunch of new titles for the iPhone on September 5. Are you ready to name any more?
TB: We’re not. We’re still in the throes of development, we’re still targeting, kind of getting to our year end. But I can say that the titles are coming along really well.

M|L: What about the games you announced on September 5?
TB: I think what we can say about those titles is you’ll notice there’s a great mix between casual and traditional videogames. When you look at titles like Sim City, Tiger Woods, Need for Speed—those are very traditional videogames. While they have broad appeal, they’re not what you consider casual or mobile titles right off the bat, although those three games do quite well in mobile, as do broader games like Sims 3 and Lemonade Tycoon, and others.

M|L: When did you get to see the touch interface? Was it a huge crunch trying to get games out?
TB: It was actually. There was a very short period of time between the first time that we got to play with the device and the actual market launch.

M|L: How long?
TB: I think it was around the April timeframe, and then the launch of the app store was—
when was that, July? So two months or so. Maybe two and a half months for the original development of the first games.

M|L: Which were Scrabble, Tetris and Sudoku.
TB: That’s correct.

M|L: So when is Tiger Woods going to hit the App Store?
TB: I don’t think we’ve announced a time on that. I’m going to be careful—

M|L: Can you give us a date off the record?
TB: We’re still looking at it. Release dates are associated more with quality than our ability to get it done. There’s a lot of room to experiment with innovation on this platform. We think we’ve really did a great job on Spore, and we’re learning what works and doesn’t work. We won’t release a game that we believe isn’t of good value—whether that’s price related or quality related or combinations of both. So if it takes a little bit more time, if the game’s not right for the market, we’ll adjust accordingly.