EA's Worldwide Customer Experience Center opens in Austin

Last summer, Electronic Arts announced that it would be expanding its operations in Texas with an assist from the state's Emerging Technology Fund, a favored program of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Part of that expansion happened this week, as EA CEO John Riccitiello, COO Peter Moore, and EA Games president Frank Gibeau were on hand in Austin for the grand opening of EA's Worldwide Customer Experience Center.

The new operation consists of 50,000 square feet of office space now dedicated to support for the publisher's entire array of games. After the event, Moore took time to answer a few questions for GameSpot about the publisher's ongoing expansion efforts in the Texas capital.

GameSpot: What is the Worldwide Customer Experience Center?

Peter Moore: As we continue a strategy to build games as a service, most recently with the launches of Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic, the ability for us to be able to manage tens of millions of consumers every day that interact with us on our service every day becomes more critical.

Austin has been important to us. As you might know, BioWare is here, and they are developing and now running The Old Republic, so having continued growth in the city of Austin and having this as the epicenter of our customer experience initiatives around the globe is important to us. It's not only customer experience and BioWare here, but our IT group has a large presence here, and EA Sports is starting to build up its presence with a small handful who are working on some incubation projects.

GS: Will the WCE handle The Old Republic or EA games at large?

PM: It will handle all games, depending on whatever the topic du jour should be. If I look at the boards right now, Battlefield 3 and FIFA are the top two games that people are answering phones and emails and doing in-game help with. BioWare actually runs its own customer service elements supported by the WCE group here. We have a special focus on that core MMO player that needs very specialized help, so that's handled within the BioWare studio itself.

GS: How many employees are you starting this with?

PM: We've got 50 working right now as regular full-time employees, and that will grow. We're hiring and training. Our footprint in Austin now as a company is over 600 strong, and you'll see several hundred as we continue to grow as a service group rather than simply a physical media group. On top of this, we have hundreds if not thousands of contract employees around the world that also help us with customer service support. It's a major part of what we do nowadays at EA.

GS: Can you give us an update on the EA Sports Austin studio?

PM: I'll call it "in incubation." We love it because it's a great sports town. This is a tremendous university city that has a very sharp focus on technology. The culture of Austin, the music, the food, the vibrancy of the young demographic that's here, it all works very well in our favor. From a sports perspective, Vancouver and Orlando are the epicenters of what we currently do, but when we look at areas where we want to expand, Austin came right behind those two cities.