The other day I visited computer game giant EA’s Swedish branch DICE. From their fantastic and huge offices, sprinkled with amazing Phillippe Starck designed lamps and furniture, I overlooked Stockholm from 100 meter+ panorama windows, while sipping away on a latte. Am I in the wrong business I wondered?
This two floor mega office houses everything from musicians and artists, to state of the art physicists, and computer graphics engineers, and I had the privilege to get the private guided tour across the entire thing, checking out all the magical departments and playing awesome unreleased games. It was like being a child in a candy store. And I can tell you this: Get their new game Mirror’s Edge when it’s released this christmas. It’s absolutely groundbreaking. And it’s got the coolest girl in the world as the main hero. I think I’m in love with her.
I was told how they go to gunranges to test fire and capture sound and motion of every concievable weapon, how they invite the worlds top martial artists for motion capture sessions and how the reasoning goes when making sure a game is FUN to play (real war is no fun, war movies with heroes are).
It became very clear to me that this will be one of our more important arenas as advertisers in a not so distant future. DICE’s test with the free game Battlefield Heroes is one of the most interesting experiments in a long time, up there with top experiments like Spotify.
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I don’t really know what we have to wait from Spotify, since websites like http://www.deezer.com/en already offer free and legal music-on-demand, on a veeeery vast catalogue! What else?
In the words of Daniel H. Pink:
Spotify is “high concept and high touch”.
It’s all in the user experience.