Madden NFL 19: Inside the Decision to Bring the Game Back to the PC

Ben Haumiller sat down with our Matt Llewellyn to talk about this year’s football release from EA, Madden NFL 19. The following is an excerpt from the full interview:

Operation Sports: Take me inside the decision to bring Madden 19 to the PC after such a long time away.

Ben Haumiller: We want to get it in front of more gamers, more players, and especially people who love Madden but maybe aren’t console gamers. This can get them back into playing Madden on PC, and visually you’ve got the ability to really make the game look amazing because you don’t have to compress assets.

You can really open up how great it can actually look on that ultra widescreen monitor. You can see the receivers that are out wide without going into Coach cam. It really frames the game in a way that makes it look amazing. We don’t view it as “oh we just made a port of our console game.” It’s 1 to 1 with everything that we’ve got on the core console version. You also have things like keyboard and mouse control so that if you’re not playing with traditional controller, you still have full fidelity to do things so that your mouse will work — like a virtual left stick so you have all your player motion there and it’s actually really intuitive. It actually feels like you’ve got full sense of your player while you’re trying to move them around with that thumbstick and then use the keyboard to do different things like passing, or jukes and spins.

When it comes to Madden Ultimate Team on the PC, how have you prepared for the inevitable attempts to potentially introduce cheats or exploits that could have real monetary consequences?

Ben Haumiller: It is our first year back on the PC, but FIFA also has a very deep Ultimate Team mode and has been on PC  for a long time now, so we can learn a lot from what they’ve done to try to protect their economy, protect their game, and make sure those sorts of exploits, and hacks and cheats aren’t there. It’s never a hundred percent, and someone is going to find something — there’s no way to fully control that. So really it’s just how can we best prepare ourselves and also identify if something does happen how quickly can we get it cleaned up.

I think looking at all the other EA titles that’s the beauty of us, and the power of EA. Every other game on PC is going through that as well, and they’re not trade secrets to the point that they’re not willing to share with us. We’re all one big team, so they have come to us and said if you’re back on PC and you’re doing Ultimate Team here are all the things you need to put in place so that you’re protected.