Company Mantra – It’s in the game!

While watching a documentary on the evolution of video games I heard the coolest company mantra ever.

It was from EA sports, the gaming company which focused on creating games which closely represented the real thing. More important for startups was how they got there. One of the key developers came up with the internal motto “if it’s in the game, it’s in the game”. This later evolved to be the brand tagline “It’s in the game!”

EA went the extremes to put everything ‘in the game’. Some of these extremes include:

  • Getting the actual TV commentators to do voice overs on the games
  • Licensing teams, sporting organizations brands & players
  • Getting the actual athletes in the studio to get each players exact movements

The result being amazingly realistic games. Amazing games which wouldn’t have been possible without the mantra – a mantra which simply did not accept compromise.

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Mantra is only powerful if we embrace it in every thing we do. EA sports did and went on to be a $4 billion US company with large profit margins.

What is your startup mantra?

steve – founder rentoid.com

4 thoughts on “Company Mantra – It’s in the game!

  1. “EA sports did and went on to be a $4 billion US company with large profit margins.” … and the most hated company from gamers and game developers alike, but I think this is irrelevant to your point.

  2. Thanks for the input Xavier. You’re right saying it’s not relevant, but It would be cool if you could tell us all why they are hated by gamers and game developers…. Nothing more annoying than companies we hate… But good to know why.

    Steve.

  3. – Treating staff like shit, the most well known drama was the ea_spouse debacle:
    http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ea_spouse
    They just laid off 600 staff as well (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20893)

    – Throwing their money around to eliminate competition. This might make good “business sense”, but it’s bad for gamers. And when a game company is doing things that are bad for gamers, I think you have a problem:
    http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/22/the-political-game-one-vote-against-an-ea-take-two-takeover/

    – Draconian copy protection (http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ea+drm)
    – Broken games, regurgitating games (no innovation), though to quote my brother:
    “This is getting much better. Spore is one of the most innovative
    games of the last 5 years. However this is because they can afford to
    get will wright with dirty money and give him a team of super coders
    with the change.”

    It’s interesting though – with the mainstream they’re still popular because nobody cares about this stuff. They’re hurting the industry for the short term gain of people who don’t know any better (parallel here to a lot of the fast food industry?). They’re getting better, which is promising, but still have a long way to go to regain the trust of the rest of the industry.

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