We haven’t heard much about EA Play’s restructure in which late last year the Casual and Sims label were merged.  Last week, GamesIndustry caught up with Russell Arons, EA Play’s Vice President to discuss the works coming from the division.

Q: Is it intentional to have those three come out now? Wasn’t The Sims 3 pushed back from its original launch date?

Russell Arons: Half strategy, half shifting. Harry Potter was supposed to launch last November. But in some cases, and EA Sports Active is a great example, the consumer research said that for a product that’s aimed largely at women who want to get in shape, that when do they want to get in shape? In time for swimsuit season. So naturally a May launch makes the most sense to lead up into the summer.

In terms of The Sims 3, the timing was in part driven to allow us to truly develop the marketing. Because we really want to be the number one PC launch of the year, it’s not just about appealing to the current Sims fans – they’re critically important, but we know we have to bring new consumers in too.

Also people who have lapsed – they tend to be males between 15-17 who used to play, but aren’t so sure now. A lot of what we’ve put significant effort into since we moved from February into June was creating trial experiences for new and lapsed players, to say that it’s a whole new Sims.

Everything from leveraging social networking heavily – our Sims Sidekick is something that launches, depending on what country you’re in, from Facebook or Bebo, that gives people a way to take Sims characters, send them around the internet and see how they react.

And for the first time ever we basically have a Sims ‘lite’ online game, called Sims Social. The consumer insight pointed to… let’s say you’re a hardcore Sims player, and I’m your girlfriend. You love the game, and try to get me to play, but I think it takes too long to play, and just want to try it out.

We never offered that before – but Sims Social is basically a way for you to play multi-player online in a trial experience. It’s a demonstration that the way we’re approaching The Sims is new in the marketing, as much as it is in the game itself.

It wasn’t enough to simply create the best Sims game ever – we had to come up with a marketing plan that brought a whole new franchise of people into it.

GamesIndustry – The Art of Play (part 1)

And here’s part two of the interview sent in by Connor from SimOperations:

Q: I assume that your marketing strategies are set on a case-by-case basis, but hw do you make decisions around that?

Russell Arons: It’s all about going to where the consumer is – we can’t expect them to have to seek us out. Still the top way with kids is TV. They’re watching television and that’s their primary source of knowledge.

But what we’re seeing with Harry Potter is that kids were going online – it’s an expensive thing to ask mom for a videogame, so they really use online to research and make sure they really want to buy the game. So we’ve moved online up as a part of our online approach significantly.

Then, as you get older, with The Sims 3 (16-24 year old primary target) – those folks aren’t watching TV. Good luck there, they’re all Tivo-ing or watching online, so we had to go online. It’s probably one of the first marketing plans in EA where the online is more heavily weighted than television – and that’s an evolution. We have to spend a lot more time getting to this consumer group, that’s a lot harder to find than ever before.

GamesIndustry – The Art of Play (part 2)