Going back to Sports as an organisation, are you happy with where the brand is now positioned?

Yeah, the brand is in a number of places. I mean [EA Sports] Active is a great example where when we were developing it we looked at 'Can the brand play here?'. A lot of conversations - do we develop a new brand, we are talking to a different consumer, it's not really a classic EA Sports game. It's not even a game! But we felt that the brand was elastic enough to stretch to that area and nobody's given it a second thought. We are taking our brand in this particular instance, as you reported last week at my Edinburgh thing, to girls and women. It's something we have to learn about. It's a completely different style of communication, different vehicles. how to communicate using a very different voice than we've typically done with our traditional games. I'm delighted with what the team has done, and obviously the results prove it out.

The brand is a great brand, it's arguably the only real brand in gaming per-say. You have the publisher 'Electronic Arts' and that's a brand but it's a company, an Activision, a or a THQ. Then you have products which are brands - Halo, or Gears of War, or LittleBigPlanet. There is really only one brand that has an umbrella that all games in that genre fit into, and that's EA Sports. We're learning where we can take it and where we need to focus and make it better, and stretch it out.

Can EA Sports go beyond games?

Absolutely, and we already are. We're doing a lot in the right now with our partner ESPN and utilising our game engines as in-studio broadcast tools. It's called virtual playbook, and we do it with American Football. It's a green-screen technology, used in a studio with cameras and then the broadcast guy, the equivalent of Martyn Tylor [a presenter] is stood there and on the screen he is surrounded by players. He can walk around, point at the players, and then the game goes in motion. It's not easy to do with American Football, but it's easier with soccer which is spread out over a bigger area. That is an important part of what we're doing which is EA Sports becoming a sports entertainment brand, not just a videogame brand that makes sports games. We're doing a lot of stuff with IMG, who is our branded licensor, that allows us to go into sports training stuff - things where we think the brand is relevant.

You've spoken in the past about the difficulty of releasing games on the platform - because of for instance.

A lot of issues, yeah.

How is your changed position progressing?

Well, our position is our position. We think the future of the PC is online. We think it's service based games, we think it's games that are always on. We're doing an interesting experiment, you should go try Tiger [Woods] Online. We think that the ability for you to play anytime, anywhere, like right now if I had five minutes I could play Tiger right now with no disc. It would save my game, and I'd go back in and it has low barriers to entry in terms of cost. It may be a subscription where it would be five bucks a month and I'd give you all the gold courses you want or it could be that new Nike clubs come up... one dollar please. Those are the business models we're seeing now and have seen in Asia for a number of years, but ultimately of the models we've seen, the future we think is that more and more stuff goes up in the cloud, less on a physical disk, more and more always on, 24 hours a day. Updated all the time, particularly in where everything is topical every single week. So last week in Tiger it was the PGA championship, and we would have had a whole week leading up to that on the service itself. That's the key with sports games.

Look at this week, as the Premier League starts. Is Chelsea going to do it? Is Liverpool going to do it, is Manchester United going to do it? Tough to do that from the physical disk, plus more and more we're seeing with the health of PC gaming in the physical disk and the monstrous growth of World of Warcraft. So our position hasn't changed.

Part two of our interview with will be live very soon.

By Luke Guttridge