Richard Hilleman of Electronic Arts delivered a short but interesting address to attendees of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a day after the company released its first two games on Ubuntu.

He highlighted the emergence of new platforms—”At least one a week. Sometimes one a day”—and the changing audiences, business models, and opportunities that come along with them.

Hilleman expressed particular enthusiasm for what he sees as the “fastest growing platforms”, namely mobile, social, and web.

“The biggest thing that’s changed is where our customers play games, who they are, and how they pay for it”, he told the audience.

“[In the past] we had a core demographic who played our games: around 50 million of them, and they were disproportionately men.”

“That’s no longer true,” he continued, noting “the fastest growing segmemnts are mobile, social and web – and all three of those formats are dominated by women.”

The change in demographics has, naturally, changed how EA make money.

“The fastest growing payment models, in the fastest growing platform, are in the ‘freemium/free-to-play models We have always been a platform agnostic company, willing to support platforms that have a viable business model,” he concluded.

I infer a passing nod to Ubuntu as he said this, given both of the newly-launched EA games on the Ubuntu Software Center are indeed paid ones leveraging Canonical’s in-app payment system.

On Walled Gardens & Native Games

Using the analogy of ‘walled gardens’, Hilleman compared the ‘open nature’ of projects like Ubuntu and Google as the ‘white spaces’ between the walls of other products.

These, he believes, are fast becoming the more important, allowing the company to ‘sew together’ its customers experiences regardless of what, when or how they play.

“Generally the open systems, the part that unify the rest of the world, are the parts that actually matter. You can only keep the world out for so long”, he surmised.

Later, Hilleman revealed some interesting information through a Q&A session:

  • EA built 14 different products for WINE, but are moving away from it
  • They will create ‘configuration sets’ with Canonical for supported hardware
  • HTML5 and WebGL has them excited since it has widest reach
  • Hilleman expects China to pick an OS ‘not made by Microsoft’
  • They’ll show a web-based game with Playstation 2-level graphics at Google I/O
  • The success of the Ubuntu titles will be based on user metrics, not revenue

In all, an insightful set of, well, insights from someone at the forefront of gaming in general. Here’s hoping there’s more for Linux in the future!