Peter Moore Sees Smaller Sports Getting Web Games [EA Sports Head Sees Smaller Niche Sports Getting Their Own Browser-Based Versions]

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EA Sports makes a lot of sports games every year. And while the company has often experimented with smaller sports titles (anybody remember their Arena Football experiment?), they often don’t come back for another year. So, what is a smaller sports fan to do? EA Sports boss Peter Moore says we may see web games just for those such sports.

You may remember Peter Moore from his time at Microsoft as the head of the Xbox division. Since 2007, he’s been the president of EA Sports. He recently sat down with iconic English gaming mag Edge and chatted with things they care about in England, like soccer er, football. But, when he wasn’t chatting up the new FIFA Online game, he was talking about smaller sports.

Edge asked if digital distrubtion would open the way for more games based on smaller sports. Moore said that there have been a few games with a lot of fans, but not enough to justifiy spending the investment on a full AAA game. He cited in particlar, lacrosse, rugby and cricket – three sports with some merging fanbases that couldn’t support a full $70 million game

But, Moore did see positive that one day we may see web games for these smaller sports.

Can we do a browser based version? So I think the answer’s yes, but we’re not there yet. Digitise that content and provide experience for – and I don’t want to call them lesser sports – but regional sports that find it difficult to scale. Codemasters were fortunate that it was such a great Ashes series last summer, but their game sold for five weeks then it died. That’s difficult.

The “Ashes” he was talking about is, of course, the great cricket series between England and Australia. Rival game developer and publisher Codemasters had licensed and produced the only official Ashes game out there. Moore hails from Liverpool, hence his knowledge about such thins.

It’s definitely possible that we might see EA push some more web-based games out there. If you look at what’s being done with HTML5 and JavaScript – for example QuakeLive, it’s possible to have a compelling web experience now. And who says you need graphics to have a great sports game? If you look at Sega’s Football Manager series, or (to a lesser extent in the ‘States) the Out Of The Park Baseball series, you can have a great sport game with just text and stats.

EA also recently bought Playfish, a company that specialized in Facebook games. I don’t think it’s crazy to expect some smaller sports to get releases on the web from EA.