BIZ: We get a lot of analyst reports and...

FG: I try not to read them...

BIZ: And a number of these analysts have criticized EA's business, noting that market share declines have been masked by EA Partners and Rock Band revenues, which you only get a part of as a distributor. What's your take on this?

FG: Well, I manage the EA Partners group inside of our label and it's a booming business for us. We have some great partners with id and Valve and Harmonix and others. So I'm not embarrassed by the business; I think it's a strength. No one else has a business of that scale or capability. So from my perspective, first, it's a positive. Second, the market share declines you would potentially see in segmenting the data that way, they're there, but I think they're not a recent phenomenon. If you look at Burnout, Army of Two... we have a strong Q4 lineup of titles when we started to rebuild our share and it wasn't just because of Rock Band. If you look at how Bad Company is doing, Boom Blox, we have a lot of really good titles. And if you look at our slate out front, and we don't have Rock Band in this area, we've got Need for Speed, Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Spore, etc...I feel very bullish that our lineup is very strong going forward and our shares will grow and climb.

It's hard to argue there was a time there where our shares did decline outside of Rock Band. I think it's true, and I think it was because we didn't have the strong title lineup on a quality level or a date level that we had some of those declines. The problem I have with analyst reports is looking forward and looking at the SKU plan, I don't think they've done a very good job of really understanding what we have coming – at least the ones that are more bearish. I think they tend to look at a snapshot in time saying it's only in the IP business now when in fact it was at a low for us in terms of the new titles we launched. Christmas, we launched Simpsons and Need for Speed, and that was it last year. ... In my group, this year I've got at least six or seven times more titles in that same little window.

BIZ: You mentioned id while talking about EAP, and you guys announced that you landed a deal to publish Rage. Historically, id has worked well with Activision, so how did you get Rage?

FG: Well, John Carmack is a founder of the industry in terms of what he's done, and he's done some interviews this week explaining how this unfolded, but to parrot what he said, as they looked at their company and how they evolved, they've been very successful, but they felt like they were going to embark on a new chapter of id, and Rage is a key part of that. They went out and solicited partners and we won. There were four of them, including incumbents, and we put together the right combination of economics, capabilities and attention to detail to what they are doing. John Riccitiello and I met with them. We spent a lot of time talking about their game. We play the games a lot, so we could give them a sense about how we were changing EA, how we're becoming a developer-first organization. He said he had an outdated impression EA was an "evil empire" ... I'm at this company because I love it and I want it to be a developer-first company – I want us to make the most creative and best hits possible, the best games in the world, and our CEO shares that vision. We're just trying to shape and change the company to allow more of that to happen and the momentum we have inside EAP and the company is really starting to bear fruit.