Christophe Labrune here with an update on the FIFA 10 Online game. FIFA 09 was the year of Online for the FIFA series. Usage more than tripled over FIFA 08 and each day since launch has seen more than 1 million matches completed. We even broke the 2 million-match-per-day bar in March.
Let’s step back for a bit, and see where this all came from…
FIFA console and online - the early days
I was brought on to the FIFA 2004 team as the PC and Online producer. Only PC had online play at the time, and the idea was to follow the early online success of console games like Madden. Internally, we wanted to focus on gameplay and Manager Mode, and we didn’t know what to expect of online on a non-PC platform. It was up to me to find that out!
We implemented 1-vs-1 gameplay on PS2 and focused on making the experience stable and fun. While testing and tuning, we started realizing how much potential Online had for FIFA.
For the complete entry, go to the Off the Bench blog: FIFA 10: The Online Game