If you want your football or baseball to cheer for you after a great play, EA Sports has just the toys for you.

EA Sports, a unit of Electronic Arts, is introducing its first line of products beyond the company's popular video games, offering sports toys and equipment to appeal to the young sports lovers in the house. 

The EA Sports-branded equipment, made by Toy Island, is rolling out now in Target and Toys "R" Us stores. Terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed.    

"We're expanding the brand to give young and future EA Sports fans a realistic and innovative experience in the real-world of sports, just as you can in the interactive world by playing an EA Sports video game," EA Sports vice president Glenn Chin said in a statement.

The products use infrared motion, touch sensors and voice command technologies. 

The "Sweet Spot Sports" line includes a football that cheers and yells "Touchdown!" when caught, or a baseball that makes a sound like a ball being hit by a bat followed by the road of the crowd after being hit. Similar products are available for hockey and basketball, and list for suggested retail prices ranging from $15 to $20.

The "Voice Command" and "Sure Shot" lines offer products for baseball, football, hockey, soccer and basketball, such as a pitching machine or a football game with a video screen to practice hitting your favorite receiver in stride, and sell for $70 to $80.

EA Sports said additional products will be available later. If it wanted to be realistic, EA Sports would introduce a ball that demands more playing time and a higher salary.

(Photo courtesy of Toy Island)

Electronic Arts is launching its most venerable video game franchise, “Madden Football,” onto the hottest new gaming platform going, Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch.

The game, whose origins date back 20 years, has been a cash cow for EA over the years, and the company is now seeking to extend that popularity into the fast-growing smartphone market. EA showed a demo of the game at Apple’s media event on Wednesday.

“We’re really happy with the quality of the game, making it fun and easy to pick up and play and we think we’ve created the most authentic and realistic football experience in the market today,” said Adam Sussman, vice president of worldwide publishing for EA Mobile.

“We were even able to get Brett Favre on the Vikings,” he added, showing that the video game giant is still nimble enough to stay current on the future Hall of Fame quarterback’s latest address.

Sussman said winnowing “Madden’s” considerable complexity and richness into a compelling smartphone game was something of a challenge. The game features 32 teams, 2,000 players and 300 different plays and has been under development for around 10 months. It utilizes the iPhone’s touchscreeen controls as well as its accelerometer (for example, you shake the device to run the hurry-up offense).

Additional goodies such as roster updates will be made available via in-app purchasing in a later update.

The game is launching Wednesday in the App Store at a special price of $7.99, before bumping up to $9.99 Thursday evening. EA says it is market share leader on the iPhone, as measured by revenue, with an average price of more than $4 for its games. It expects to launch 40 iPhone games this fiscal year.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts will report first-quarter earnings after the bell today, amid Wall Street’s hopes of an industry comeback in the second half of the year. June video game sales in the U.S. were pretty dismal, but investors are probably betting on big-name game titles and possible game console price cuts to pump some life back into the slump in the second half of 2009.

Analysts say EA, the publisher of hit football game Madden NFL, likely had a strong June quarter, even though they are predicting a loss per share of 13 cents. Last week, UBS initiated coverage of EA and Activision with “buy” ratings. The firm expects the $39 billion industry to grow to $55 billion in 2012, and believes EA is a compelling turnaround story because of its re-energized game strategy.

Activision, which reports Wednesday, of course remains the industry darling, with an enviable stable of franchises, including Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, new installments of which will be released later in the year.

Will the video game publishers see a better second half?

Keep an eye on:

• Twitter, a threat to football’s success. (The New York Times)
• Time Warner could sell less-successful magazines and keep profitable ones. (Washington Post)
• Spotify, tipped to be a potential iTunes challenger, secures funding. (Financial Times)

Photo: Tinlyn Jacobson plays EA’s Sports Active game for the Wii at E3/Reuters.

In the highly demanding (and some say shrinking) world of PC gaming, only two graphics powers really count: reigning popular champ Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division. Now it looks like ATI’s Radeon may have got a bit of a lead on its arch-foe.

ATI, once considered a perennial also-ran to Nvidia’s cutting-edge graphics chips, has become the first to crack what it called the 1 Gigahertz barrier on standard air-cooling. Pounding its chest, the company trumpeted on Wednesday the milestone and talked about “amazing gaming experiences” for the likes of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. and Electronic Arts’ Battleforge.

It would be interesting to see how Nvidia — whose logo still appears more often alongside cutting-edge games such as medieval third-person actioner Assassin’s Creed to blockbuster first-person shooter Crysis — will respond in their never-ending arms race.

Another interesting point some blogsites bring up: gamers routinely “overclock” their cards, or run their graphics processors at a faster than factory-based speed, meaning the 1Ghz barrier was probably broken some time back. AMD touts the new ATI Radeon HD 4890 as “factory-overclocked”.

AMD forgot to say how much it would actually cost, retail.

And it’s no long-term fix for choppy cut-scenes and jittery screen-scrolling either. As PC gamers well know, the GPU or graphics card is fundamental to the gaming experience. Unlike console gamers who rarely fret much about compatibility issues and hardware requirements, Windows gamers have to worry about everything from DirectX 10.1 to which card is optimized for what game. ATI’s supersonic new card merely represents a short-term solution to the ever-increasing demands that today’s games put on hardware.

(Photo: Crysis screenshot provided by Electronic Arts)

Wednesday’s announcement that celebrated game designer Will Wright is parting company with Electronic Arts is the latest piece of tough news in what has been a difficult year for EA. Wright, who masterminded the “Sims” franchise along with the newer  “Spore”, is a certifiable legend who has been called the the “Albert Einstein of the gaming business.”

“Sims” and its related spinoffs have sold more than 100 million units over the years.

In February, EA posted weaker-than-expected results, and delayed the release of several games — including “Sims 3″ — causing it to forecast a loss for the fiscal year. The company is cutting 1,100 jobs even as it goes mano-a-mano with larger rival Activision Blizzard.

Cowen analyst Doug Creutz said in a research note he doesn’t expect Wright’s departure to have a near-term impact on EA’s financials: “However, his departure is likely to be a long-term negative as Wright’s games have been some of EA’s most profitable franchises, and Wright has been the leader in game design at EA’s Maxis studio. Wright has also been the most visible and respected talent at EA for many years.”

Wright will turn his focus to a company he founded a few years back, the Stupid Fun Club. EA and Wright will hold an equal stake in the venture, an “entertainment think tank” developing a whole range of content.

“The venture with EA appears to give Wright a much more significant economic stake in his future game designs, as well as more creative control,” Creutz wrote.

(Photo: Reuters)

How do entertainment retailers come up with the prices they charge? Why is a movie theater ticket $10, a music CD $15, a rental DVD $3-$5 and a top video game $60?

We asked Strauss Zelnick, executive chairman of game publisher Take-Two. He says it’s simple math, based upon the value of that experience.

Prices are determined by the marketplace — if folks stopped buying stuff, prices would fall, etc. (Think gasoline). Balance that with cost. A game like Halo or Grand Theft Auto takes years to develop and costs as much to make as a Hollywood film.

Here’s Zelnick in his own words:

The reason the consumer is willing to pay $60 for front-line product is because they are going to get 20-plus hours of game play out of that product.

I’m a big believer that there is an equation for the pricing of front-line entertainment products, which is: The hours of expected consumption times the value per hour, plus the catalog value.

The price per hour is pretty stable across media. For example, a motion picture: You have two hours of experience in the theater, a very high-quality experience, zero catalog value. So what’s that worth? I guess about $5 an hour (on a per capita basis). If you apply that to a video rental, also zero catalog value, there’s multiple people watching typically, it’s a lower quality experience, that’s how you get a video rental of three bucks. Recorded music, you will listen to the album (up to 10 times — or hours — on average). The same equation applies.

There’s more:

What’s driving that front-line price point is the perceived quality of the experience, times the number of hours you are going to have that, so that the price per quality hour of the experience, times the hours, plus catalog value. And I understand why that number would be, for the sake of argument, $60, versus for sake of argument, $15 for an album, versus $3 for a video rental, versus 10 to see a front line movie.
They are not so far off.

So it’s not that we came up with that price point out of the blue. If we came up with it out of the blue, we wouldn’t be selling anything at that price point.

For the record, the industry walks the walk. Take-Two’s Grand Theft Auto has sold more than 10 million units in less than a year. And other huge industry sellers such as Metal Gear Solid, Fable, Halo, Madden NFL, Rock Band and Guitar Hero? Most have sold more than a million copies — at $60 a pop, or more.

I admit that I’ve bought $5 DVDs, cheered, and watched them only once. I’ve also paid $60 for games, grumbled about it, and played them for months. Now I’m thinking about buying Rock Band 2 ($189) or Guitar Hero: World Tour (also $189) for the holidays. (grumble grumble grumble)

So what do you think? Are video games fairly priced?

(Photos: Screenshot from Amazon.com; Zelnick, Reuters)

Microsoft's videogame chief Shane Kim came by our New York office this morning for the Reuters Media Summit and shared his thoughts on XBox 360 sales ("cautiously optimistic") and the outlook for the gaming industry amid the economic doom-and-gloom ("Who knows, maybe flat performance will be considered a remarkable achievement").

He also gazed into his crystal ball and served up some insights on the trends shaping the gaming business.

Consolidation is going to continue, he thinks, especially among the smaller videogame publishers as they search for hit games while keeping costs in check.

"There are a number of mid-tier publishers behind the Electronic Arts and Ubisofts and Activisions of the world who are struggling."

Another exciting trend for Kim is the return to videogame content developed by small creative teams, which he thinks could reduce the industry's dependence on sequels of hit games.

"That would be a good thing... because one of the challenges the industry has had, in my opinion, over the last five to 10 years is a growing reliance on sequels and licensed properties as opposed to those new creative hits. If we can find those nuggets that start smaller and can grow into big hits, that's a great thing."

He did wonder how smaller creative shops could find funding for their pitches, given that dollars could be hard to come by these days. But at the same time, it's an opportunity for bigger publishers, he said, since nothing rocks the gaming world like a hit game.

(Photo: Reuters)

When the going gets tough, the tough play dress up.

Women-focused cable channel Lifetime Network on Monday expanded its push into gaming by buying Korean casual gaming site, Roiworld.com, the No. 1 teen dress up site in Korea.

Terms were undisclosed, but the company says its move to tap into the female gaming audience, particularly where they use avatars to dress up,  is paying big and younger dividends.

While Lifetime’s traditional TV audience has tended  to skew to more mature women,  the network is trying to broaden its audience to include more younger viewers and its Web dress-up properties are drawing women, largely aged 30 and below. Roiworld.com will bring more than 1,000 additional fashion and style games to the Lifetime Games portfolio, which it claims is a  top 25 online destination among casual gaming sites.

The ”Dress Up” category lets users dress up an avatar, combining user-generated content, social networking and virtual world experiences through fashion. The new Roiworld.com is currently set to launch in the U.S. in early 2009.  The Korean version of Roiworld.com had 2.8 million monthly unique visitors and 117 million monthly page views during the month of September.

With the popularity of the Nintendo Wii console and DS handheld system, game publishers are also turning their attention to girls, with the holidays promising to feature a heavy lineup of games for girls. Some of the biggest include THQ’s “All Star Cheer Squad”, Electronic Arts’ “Littlest Pet Shop”, Disney Interactive’s “High School Musical 3″ and Ubisoft’s “Imagine” series. Womens’ TV and gaming also intersected last week when game publisher Electronic Arts appointed Geraldine Laybourne, founder of womens network Oxygen Media, to its board of directors.

    At Europe’s biggest video games convention in Leipzig last week, evidence of a distinctive European flavour was largely absent, apart from in karaoke-style titles such as Activision’s Guitar Hero or Sony’s SingStar and sports games.
    Music from local bands and singers is a necessity for these titles, and the new World Tour edition of Guitar Hero delivered it in the form of artists such as Germany’s emo-lite Tokio Hotel, Swedish rockers Kent and Spanish 80s classic Radio Futura.
    Sony offered a more unusual twist with a Turkish Party edition of SingStar for release in Germany in November, to capitalise on the country’s large Turkish population as well as nostalgic holidaymakers.
    In the case of sports games, a title such the next annual revamp of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer is understandably expected to sell better in Europe than the United States.
    But outside these two genres, industry executives struggled to pin down differences. Konami’s head of Europe, Kunio Neo, noted that Europeans did not take to games with manga-style graphics as readily as gamers in the company’s Japanese homeland. Konami also said it expected one game in development, Lords of Shadow, to appeal particularly to European sensibilities — early artwork leans heavily on director Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth, which was set in Spain.
    Neo’s counterpart at Electronic Arts, Jens Uwe Intat, made similar claims for Mirror’s Edge, which he said had a high-end aesthetic which he hoped would be particularly successful in Europe.
    But Intat in general saw little difference between what made a hit game in Europe compared to the United States.
    “With the exception of American football all franchises that work in the U.S. work in Europe too — though as in the movie industry you see slightly different top tens,” he told Reuters just before the start of the Leipzig event.
    Yet critics can easily point to distinctive traditions of French, Italian and British film alongside Hollywood and Japanese movies, which has no equivalent in video games. Why do you think this is? Does it bother you?

    The rise of casual video gaming may have grabbed the headlines over the past couple of years, but the more hardcore end of the market dominated at Europe’s biggest gaming convention in Leipzig last week.
    Apart from new iterations of popular karaoke-style games such as Activision’s Guitar Hero, Electronic Arts‘ RockBand and Sony’s SingStar, which arguably kick-started the trend of easy-to-play casual fare, the world’s biggest games publishers focused on products for their core audience.
    Upcoming release Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 was a case in point. Not only does the game involve sending dozens of types of futuristic military unit across apocalyptic landscapes, but EA was marketing it in part on the basis that one of the
actresses in it, Jenny McCarthy, is a former Playboy playmate of the year.
    Most publishers were playing it safe, focusing on sequels such as a new version of The Sims – the virtual doll’s house franchise which has sold over 100 million copies since launch in 200? — or movie tie-ins such as a game based on new James Bond film Quantum of Solace.
    True innovation was thin on the ground, at least on a whistle-stop tour view of the main publishers’ offerings. Ubisoft demoed a game in the same genre as Command and Conquer which could be fully voice-controlled — apparently a first for consoles — while Sony previewed LittleBigPlanet. This marries the hot theme of user-designed content (think YouTube or MySpace) to an age-old platforming mechanic, the basics of which that would be familiar to anyone who had played Nintendo’s Mario games.
    Cute sack-doll characters jump over flames and on to rising platforms, but the novelty is that most of the game, from the characters’ outfits and personalities to the landscapes over which they clamber can be modified by players and shared online.
    But for two of the other most hotly awaited games of the season, there was no news, albeit for opposite reasons. EA’s Spore, in which players guide a lifeform in the Darwinian struggle from primaeval soup to interplanetary conflict, is due out on Sept. 4 and had already been presented in near-final form at other events, so did not get a spot in EA’s main presentation.
    World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the next installment of the online role-playing game that has over 10 million subscribers — was available to play in an early form, but it remained unclear when the final version would be on sale. A spokesman for Activision unit Blizzard could not even confirm it would definitely be out before Christmas.

    * Where do you think gaming is going in the run-up to this year’s holiday season? Were you at the Leipzig Games Convention? Tell us what you think below.